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

Home , Adam Kirsch, David Foster (writer), Infinite Summer, Lewis Hyde, The Broom of the System

BIG BOOKS: ADDICTION AND RECOVERY IN THE NOVELS OF DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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 devoted solely to Wallace’s work, including the first book in Bloomsbury’s new David Foster Wallace Studies series.2, 3 In 2009, the University of Texas acquired

1 Chapter 1’s epigraph is drawn from Max, D. T. "Angels of Death: David Foster Wallace and the Battle against Irony, Letterman and Leyner?" MIT Comparative Media Studies Colloquium Podcast, 11 Mar. 2013, 00:31:55– 00:32:02.

2 For an online listing of most of these articles, I suggest the excellent “Bibliography of Secondary Criticism” by the Glasgow David Foster Wallace Research Group, found at https://davidfosterwallaceresearch.wordpress.com/.

3 The monographs include: Stephen J. Burn’s David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest: A Reader’s Guide (2003), William Dowling and Robert Bell’s A Reader’s Companion to Infinite Jest (2005), Greg Carlisle’s Elegant Complexity: A Study of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (2007), Stefan Hirt's The Iron Bars of Freedom, David Foster Wallace and the Postmodern Self (2008), David Hering’s Consider David Foster Wallace: Critical Essays (2010), Steven M. Cahn and Maureen Eckert's Fate, Time, and Language (2011), Stephen J. Burn’s David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest: A Reader’s Guide. Expanded 2nd ed. (2012), Samuel Cohen and Lee Konstantinou’s The Legacy of David Foster Wallace (2012), Marshall Boswell and Stephen J. Burn’s A Companion to David Foster Wallace Studies (2013), Greg Carlisle’s Nature’s Nightmare: Analyzing David Foster Wallace’s Oblivion (2013), Robert K. Bolger and Scott Korb’s Gesturing Toward Reality: David Foster Wallace and Philosophy (2014), Marshall Boswell’s David Foster Wallace and “The Long Thing”: New Essays on the Novels (2014), Steven M.

Wallace’s archive, which was opened to the public for research at the Harry Ransom Center in

Austin the following year.4 Ten Wallace conferences have been held since 2009, all of them organized by graduate students and held at institutions like the University of Liverpool, CUNY, the University of Antwerp, and the University of Paris. This year marks the appearance of panels on Wallace’s work at both MLA and ALA, the fourth consecutive year of the Annual

International David Foster Wallace Conference at Illinois State University, and the first Wallace conference in Australia, OzWallace, which will take place in Melbourne this September.5

Within this voluminous body of work, there are identifiable stages in the evolution of

Wallace Studies criticism. Adam Kelly, in his 2010 essay “David Foster Wallace: the Death of the Author and the Birth of a Discipline” (later republished and updated to include sources published between 2010 and 2014 in Philip Coleman’s Critical Insights: David Foster Wallace as “David Foster Wallace: The Critical Reception”) identifies three such distinct critical modes.

In the first, the earliest Wallace critics “understood Wallace’s fiction primarily in terms of its emphasis on science and information system and its intersections with American postmodernism” (Kelly 47). This approach is exemplified in the first responses to Wallace’s work between 1993 and 1999 by N. Katherine Hayles (“The Illusion of Autonomy and the Fact

Cahn and Maureen Eckert’s Freedom and the Self: Essays on the Philosophy of David Foster Wallace (2015), Philip Coleman’s Critical Insights: David Foster Wallace (2015), Allard den Dulk’s Existentialist Engagement in Wallace, Eggers, and Foer (2015), Clare Hayes-Brady’s The Unspeakable Failures of David Foster Wallace: Language, Identity, and Resistance (2016), David Hering’s David Foster Wallace: Fiction and Form (2016), Lucas Thompson’s Global Wallace: David Foster Wallace and World Literature (2016), Adam S. Miller's The Gospel According to David Foster Wallace: Boredom and Addiction in an Age of Distraction (2016), and Jeffrey Severs’s David Foster Wallace’s Balancing Books: Fictions of Value (2017).

4 http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/

5 For information on the earliest of these, visit the “Conferences” section of Nick Maniatis’s website at http://www.thehowlingfantods.com/dfw/conferences; for the 2017 MLA panel, go to https://apps.mla.org/conv_listings_detail?prog_id=444&year=2017; for the 2017 ALA panel, see https://www.dfwsociety.org/2017/02/07/1718/; for the 2017 ISU DFW Conference, refer to http://www.wallaceconference.com; and for OzWallace, consult https://www.facebook.com/OzWallace2017/.

of Recursivity: Virtual Ecologies, Entertainment, and Infinite Jest”) and James Rother (“Reading and Riding the Post-Scientific Wave: The Shorter Fiction of David Foster Wallace”).

The second phase of critical response to Wallace’s work runs from roughly 2000 to 2009 and is dominated by Wallace’s own articulation of his fiction’s goals as he outlined them in a pair of publications that Kelly refers to as “the essay-interview nexus”: Wallace’s essay “E

Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” and an interview with Wallace by Larry

McCaffery, both of which originally appeared in a 1993 issue of The Review of Contemporary

Fiction.. Broadly stated, those goals have to do with manipulating his form to more fully engage his readers. By crafting self-reflexive fiction that requires participation from its readers—either by ultimately directing us to something outside the text or by constructing recursive narrative loops that we must imaginatively complete ourselves—Wallace attempted to foster in his audience a self-awareness similar to his own. Critical appraisals in this second period are primarily conducted along two thematic lines: the “role of irony” and of “metafictional self- reflexivity in contemporary writing” (Kelly 47). This now-shopworn approach to framing

Wallace’s project received its most complete treatment in pieces like A. O. Scott’s “The Panic of

Influence,” published in 2000 in The New York Review of Books, and in Mary K. Holland’s

“‘The Art’s Heart’s Purpose’: Braving the Narcissistic Loop of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite

Jest,” published in Critique in 2006.

The third wave of Wallace criticism, one that my own project engages with, was inaugurated with the publication of Jon Basin’s “Death is Not the End: David Foster Wallace:

His Legacy and his Critics,” which was published in 2010 in the first issue of The Point.

Characterized by Kelly as focusing on the ethical dimension of Wallace’s writing, this third wave of criticism reads Wallace’s later work as not simply content to diagnose cultural

problems, but as fulfilling ethical fiction’s obligation to point to some sort of solution. While the majority of this later criticism also emphasizes Wallace’s concern for the writer-reader relationship and the ways it highlights sameness rather than difference, there is finally, in some of the most recent critical efforts by Clare Hayes-Brady, Tara Morrissey, and Lucas Thompson, an attempt to examine Wallace’s problematic status in discourses of gender and critical race theory.6

Though my project has thematic affinities with second and third-wave Wallace criticism, my approach differentiates itself in a couple of ways. My analysis extends an account of

Wallace’s substance abuse—one pieced together by D. T. Max while researching his biography of Wallace, Every Love Story is a Ghost Story—by projecting its narrative arc of addiction and recovery onto the span of Wallace’s novelistic output. Max’s skill as a biographer cannot be overstated, and this project would not exist without the foundation laid by his work, but as a biography, its principal business lies in accounting for the Wallace who was as an actual living person rather than Wallace-as-writer, however closely intertwined the two may have been. And while Max provides a detailed chronology of the conditions surrounding the creation of

Wallace’s work, performing a sustained literary-critical analysis of that work is necessarily beyond his scope.

For his biographer, understanding that from 19 Wallace identified chiefly as a recovering addict was crucial for making sense of certain choices and events in Wallace’s personal life that would otherwise seem unrelated or coincidental. For me, understanding that from November

6 Hayes-Brady, Clare. The Unspeakable Failures of David Foster Wallace: Language, Identity, and Resistance. Bloomsbury, 2017. Morrissey, Tara and Lucas Thompson. “‘The Rare White at the Window’: A Reappraisal of Mark Costello and David Foster Wallace’s Signifying Rappers.” Journal of American Studies, vol. 49, no. 1, February 2015, pp. 77-97.

1989 onward Wallace saw himself primarily as a recovering addict is essential to the way of reading of Wallace I find the most productive. This reading is also a uniquely useful way to account for the differences between his only two novels—a difference that is one of the current project’s central concerns.

The presence of Alcoholics Anonymous in Infinite Jest has not gone critically unnoticed.

But given the many long stretches of the novel that are set in Boston AA meetings, the amount of secondary literature that reads Wallace through AA is scant, especially since Max’s biography has made obvious the overlaps between the 12-step programs in Wallace’s personal history and his fiction. Though a handful of critics have published shorter pieces7 considering addiction or recovery in Wallace’s writing, there exists no monograph-length study of the enormous importance of 12-step recovery across the larger body of his work, nor any sustained study of the way that Wallace’s religious attendance of AA meetings or his rigid adherence to its 12-step program informs his larger fictional project. Wallace considered himself an addict; failure to read him as one is to miss the forest for the trees.

Among the aforementioned handful of Wallace critics, Timothy Aubry, the author of

“Selfless Cravings: Addiction and Recovery in Wallace’s Infinite Jest” comes closest to my approach. My project, however, avails itself of a crucial advantage that was unavailable when

Aubry’s piece went to print: the publication of Wallace’s first biography. Its narrative of

Wallace’s personal substance abuse and recovery, repurposed as a frame for my project, allows me to broaden my scope beyond Aubry’s to examine the influence of 12-step recovery on

7 These include Robert K. Bolger’s “‘A Less “Bullshitty’ Way to Live: The Pragmatic Spirituality of David Foster Wallace” (2014), Elizabeth Freudenthal’s “Anti-Interiority: Compulsiveness, Objectification, and Identity in Infinite Jest” (2010), Casey Michael Henry’s “‘Sudden Awakening to the Fact That the Mischief Is Irretrievably Done’”: Epiphanic Structure in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest” (2015), Emily Spalding’s “The Addiction Spectrum: An Analysis of the Three Branches of Addiction in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest” (2016), and Petrus van Ewijk’s “‘I’ and the ‘Other’: The Relevance of Wittgenstein, Buber and Levinas for an Understanding of AA’s Recovery Program in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest” (2009).

Wallace’s writing in a broader context—that is, to look thematically at addiction and recovery across Wallace’s larger body of work. Like the patterns Max identified and arranged into

Wallace’s personal narrative, familiarity with Wallace’s experiences as a member of 12-step programs allows me to make sense of the otherwise inexplicable formal and narrative differences between Wallace’s two novels. In “Selfless Cravings,” AA’s chief function is to provide a narrative counterweight to a dispassionate aesthetic prevailing in American literature at that time;

Aubry sees AA as a kind of Trojan horse by which Wallace smuggled his more sentimental tendencies into the novel. I contend rather that Wallace’s adoption and internalization of 12-step doctrine is what made Infinite Jest possible at all.

My adoption of a literary-critical approach informed by a biographical interpretation of

Wallace’s recovery, owes a significant scholarly debt to Trysh Travis and her book The

Language of the Heart.8 Without Travis’s example and encouragement, this project would not have been allowed to proceed. (I retain, however, sole responsibility for any omissions, errors of logic, and general shortcomings herein.) I am also indebted to a line of critical thought about the rhetoric of addiction and recovery that can be traced back to a 2001 text by Sidonie Smith and

Julia Watson, titled Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. But whereas Smith and Watson use autobiographical narratives and the rhetoric of addiction to explain high-theoretical concepts, I read Wallace’s biographical narrative to explain his eventual devaluation or sublimation of theory to more important narrative concerns.

My project also contributes to newer critical discussions concerning the ethical turn in

Wallace’s mature fiction by locating the genesis of this turn in Wallace’s nonfiction—

8 I should also acknowledge Travis’s keen observation that in a world in which sincerity has been coopted by corporations and is performed in insincere ways, the only choice is to be self-aware that one’s own sincerity is a performance, and so in many ways, “sincerity” is a spoiled category—the best one can do is acknowledge her process. This insight helped me navigate some of this project’s particularly troublesome logical fallacies.

specifically, in his literary criticism published during the inter-novel period when Wallace begins his substance-abuse recovery process in AA. My reading of Wallace’s work as an application or internalization of AA’s principles is far from an original analytical move; it borrows from concepts developed in Robyn Warhol-Down’s early work on life writing—although my reading of Wallace has perhaps more in common with her more recent “Academics Anonymous: A

Meditation on Anonymity, Power, and Powerlessness,” and its analysis of how AA’s policy of anonymity constitutes a “challenge [to] American individualism” that flattens power distinctions and builds communities (53).

My particular application of AA’s 12-step doctrine involves plotting Wallace’s two novels as points on a fictional curve that corresponds with Wallace’s biological trajectory of addiction and recovery, identifying Wallace’s participation in twelve-step programs as the locus of both his recovery from alcohol and substance abuse as well as his fiction’s recovery from its addiction to an over-reliance on literary theory.

Here and throughout, my shorthand use of “theory” should be understood as containing a subset of mid-20th-century French and continental philosophers and critical theorists, namely the poststructuralist writers Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan, and Michel Foucault.

For an account of how “literary criticism” became “literary theory” and then simply “theory,” see Vincent B. Leitch’s American Literary Criticism Since the 1930s, esp. pp. 152-156,

“Continental Philosophy in America, the first and second waves,” and Jonathan Culler’s 1997

Oxford UP work, Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction.

When I discuss theory as Wallace used it, the aforementioned list of French theorists also includes one important addition: the ordinary-language philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, a thinker who contributed much to the “linguistic turn” in philosophy that so influenced the

structuralists and their conclusions about the relationship between language and reality—and which the aforementioned poststructuralists reacted to in their own work. For the intersections of

Wittgenstein and literary theory, see John Gibson and Wolfgang Huemer’s The Literary

Wittgenstein (Routledge, 2004). Wallace became interested in Wittgenstein while pursuing his undergraduate philosophy degree, and for him, the boundary between language-philosophy and poststructuralism or deconstruction is a highly permeable one. His interest in theory was first and foremost about trying to understand the nature of language’s relationship with reality. But in his mature writing, Wallace began to see a danger in the tendency of poststructuralist theory’s logic to bend back inward, toward itself, creating the sorts of aporias that deconstruction delights in, but which tend to run in circles or dead end at an undecidability. While intellectually engaging in some ways, Wallace ultimately found this tendency counterproductive to his ethical fiction’s mission of attempting to engage readers more self-critically.

Wallace’s mature writing offers an antidote to the numbness and complacency induced by our immersion in a culture of unceasing distraction—a condition he referred to as “total noise” (“Deciderization” xiii). He was acutely aware of fiction’s unique ability to allow us access to another’s consciousness in ways that deepen our capacity for identification and empathy, that focus our attention on similarity rather than difference. But insofar as Wallace’s fiction affords us a vantage point outside our own, it provides escape in order to demand engagement. By working to bridge the reader’s isolated consciousness with another’s, it models the imaginative process of finding common ground, something Wallace felt was imperative in what he understood as an increasingly polarized political landscape. Wallace was a keen observer of culture, and this acuity gives his writing an uncanny prescience—especially now. Infinite Jest in particular anticipates an America Wallace would never live to experience, one in which the

political divisiveness he saw on the horizon twenty years ago has made landfall at hurricane strength.

To wit: In Infinite Jest’s fictional near-future, the president of the United States is Johnny

Gentle, a dark horse candidate who, thanks to “a surreal union of both Rush L.- and Hillary R.C.- disillusioned fringes that drew mainstream-media guffaws,” was elected on his promise of a

“tighter, tidier nation… that looked out for [Numero] Uno, of a one-time World Policeman that was now going to retire” (382-383). When Gentle attempts to make good on his campaign pledge by literally exporting the country’s garbage, his halfcocked policy causes an international diplomatic crisis. Gentle’s administration responds with an “experialist reconfiguration”— redrawing the borders around a large swath of land in the northeastern United States, effectively

“donating” it to Canada, and then building a wall along the new border, over which enormous garbage launchers catapult the USA’s trash (411). Wallace’s vision of a disastrously shortsighted nation obsessed with entertainment at any cost has, in the two decades since its publication, revealed itself as less satirical than prophetic.

The earliest Wallace fan communities were formed on the (pre-broadband) internet, and some of the oldest of these—like the Wallace-l email listserv and the original Wallace fan-site, thehowlingfantods.com/dfw/—remain active. Recent years have seen a steady increase in the number of internet-based Wallace communities, including several months-long, guided group- readings of Infinite Jest on various social media platforms and a bi-weekly podcast, The Great

Concavity, devoted to discussing Wallace and his work. There is at present a kind of consolidation of these Wallace-related groups, one that I feel impossibly fortunate to have been asked to participate in. On January 2, 2017, The International David Foster Wallace Society was launched. The website opens with a mission statement:

The International David Foster Wallace Society was founded to promote and sustain the long-term scholarly and independent study of David Foster Wallace’s writing. To these ends, the Society welcomes diverse, peer-reviewed scholarship and seeks to expand the critical boundaries of Wallace studies. We recognize and champion the visual, the alternative, and the literary: the presence of minds at work. The Society showcases a variety of projects—at conferences, on panels, in our print publication, The Journal of David Foster Wallace Studies, and through other non- traditional modes of scholarly expression. (“Mission Statement”)

As a member of the board for both the Wallace Society and The Journal of David Foster

Wallace Studies, I have observed firsthand what seems to be a new canonization model emerging, one in which the university no longer functions as the gatekeeping arbiter of an author’s suitability for serious study. In this model, the usual transmission vector is reversed: traditional academics must apprise themselves of the history and current directions in critical discourse of multiple generations of Wallace scholarship begun not in English departments, but in independent, online scholarly communities. Similar to the way that Wallace reformed his use of theory by jettisoning those ideas that proved harmful or counterproductive to his writing while holding firm to what still worked, it is the stated aim of both the Wallace Society and its journal to promote academic scholarship without repeating the mistakes of the academy’s past.

There is palpable undercurrent of humility in Wallace Studies, a collective sense of gratitude for Wallace’s work. For these critics, Wallace’s texts are more than a matter of professional curiosity or academic interest—they are objects of individual significance. Many of them share a common experience as readers—one that rarely obtains between other authors and their respective academic counterparts; Infinite Jest, for example, matters to Wallace Studies in a way that Ulysses does not for all but the most evangelical Joyceans.

Though the academic apparatus that now attends Wallace's work appears similar to those of authors like James Joyce, Thomas Pynchon, or Don DeLillo, the scholarly community that has coalesced into Wallace Studies is marked by a fundamental difference. The distinction that sets it

apart concerns how Wallace’s mature sense of his fiction’s purpose led him to manipulate his form so that it might better engage with readers. The relationship between Wallace and his readers was one that he went to great lengths to cultivate. Why Wallace came to see this relationship as valuable and the ways he endeavored to cultivate it with his fiction are the subject of this dissertation.

Recovering Theory Addicts

David Foster Wallace was once described as a “recovering smart aleck,” but I propose instead to consider him as a recovering theory-addict, or rather to consider one a function of the other (Miller). Between his first two novels, he weaned himself off a reliance on a conspicuous narrative foregrounding of poststructuralist theory, progressing into a writer capable of bringing that theory to life through a deeper, more honest narrative engagement with its application to everyday human relationships as well as to the bond between artist and audience. This reformed

Wallace took the sterile, abstract paradoxes and double-binds that obsess theoretical writers and repurposed them as models for understanding not just the crises of individual experience, but also of American culture more broadly.

Over the course of his literary career, Wallace completed only two novels—The Broom of the System (1987), which is generally dismissed as the work of a young author enamored of his own talent, and Infinite Jest (1996), which is not uncommonly hailed as “the voice of a generation.” My dissertation examines the radical changes in Wallace’s use of theory between these two novels and ultimately claims that Wallace’s revised approach was successful in producing fiction that is both sincere in its concern for the reader and “serious” in that it countenanced poststructuralist claims about the nature of texts and authors.

I nest this literary analysis in Wallace’s biography. David Foster Wallace was an addict.

His freshman year of high school, he started self-medicating the anxiety and phobias of a mental

illness that began when he was ten years old by drinking alcohol and smoking large amounts of marijuana. Over the next fifteen years, what began as coping mechanisms grew into dependency, and at 28, Wallace’s excessive substance abuse and a concomitant mental health crisis landed him in a series of hospitals, state-run mental health facilities, and a halfway house for recovering addicts. As a recovering addict, Wallace joined twelve-step programs for both narcotics and alcohol, maintaining his sobriety with regular attendance at Narcotics Anonymous and

Alcoholics Anonymous meetings until his death in 2008.

My project tells a different kind of recovery story. Because of its uncanny resonances with Wallace’s biographical history and with the recurrent themes spanning his entire literary output, I read his texts through the institutional language of addiction and the inherent narrative structure of twelve-step recovery programs. This approach, which understands Wallace’s first two novels as a progression toward an open-ended and always-contingent recovery through the conscious practice of mindfulness, is one that both Wallace’s life and work seem to invite. The three-part narrative schema of twelve-step recovery programs—“what we were like, what happened, and what we are like now” (Alcoholics Anonymous 58)—is, in the 12-step world, a way of accounting for one’s addiction and recovery by conferring order on past experience and affirming sobriety as integral to identity. Overlaying it on Wallace’s two novels directs attention to the second part of this schema, suggesting the ten-year, inter-novel period as a space in which to start answering the question that occasioned my project: Compared to Wallace’s first novel, what is it about Infinite Jest that continues to resonate with an increasing number of contemporary readers?

Wallace was the son of two teachers. His mother taught community college courses in

English, and his father was a tenured Professor of Philosophy at the University of Illinois in

Champaign-Urbana. Sally Wallace, an eccentric prescriptive grammarian whose zeal for correct usage at times bordered on the extreme, imprinted her exacting habits and need for order on her son from a young age. His father was of a similar cast of mind. The author of several books on ethical philosophy, James Wallace’s own work required stable, a priori notions of truth and meaning. The picture of the world Wallace grew up with—its rationalist ethical imperatives and linguistic absolutes—left a deep and lasting impression. Later, as an undergraduate at Amherst college, when Wallace first encountered thinkers like Richard Taylor, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and

Jacques Derrida who complicated or contradicted his rigid epistemological models, he found them deeply unsettling.

This sort of early cognitive indoctrination predisposes one’s understanding of the world in subtle but fundamental ways. When the value of “order” is presented as fact, enlightenment notions of linear progress appear to be but necessary consequences that reaffirm an underlying natural order. It is a type of thinking that makes, for example, Thomas Kuhn’s explanation of how the history of ideas proceeds in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions seem inevitable and universal: “Once it has achieved the status of paradigm, a scientific theory is declared invalid only if an alternate candidate is available to take its place…. The decision to reject one paradigm is always simultaneously the decision to accept another, and the judgment leading to that decision involves the comparison of both paradigms with nature and with each other” (77). Said another way: When an existing paradigm is supplanted by a newer one, the new one isn’t just different, it’s better. But outside the sciences, works of art, or philosophy, and literature have a genuine interest in what the existence of undecidable conflicts reveals about our basic assumptions regarding the nature and limits of truth, or meaning, or of knowledge itself.

For Wallace, the idea that there were contradictions in his understanding of the fundamental nature of language and its relation to truth was extremely destabilizing. But in his first novel, he abandoned his stable worldview in order to embrace the instability of poststructuralist theory and linguistic philosophy. The result was The Broom of the System, a book of word games and mind games that critics like Caryn James described as “flawed extravaganza” in its attempts impress readers (9). Wallace’s reaction in this instance is one that seems less severe to me than it probably should. I recognize in it the jettisoning of my own long- held, unexamined notions of authors, texts, and meaning during a graduate-level survey of twentieth-century literary theory and criticism.

In my theory seminar, I was confronted with a century’s worth of competing—yet often equally plausible—explanations about how things like meaning and language worked. Such a multiplicity of authority seemed to fly in the face of everything I’d learned about the accretive nature of knowledge, which was that big ideas with unassailable logic operated with the force of fact because they were the latest and therefore best explanations available. Trying to reconcile these competing notions was only made worse by what I understood then as the particularly disastrous implications of poststructuralist theory: if meaning wasn’t stable but rather infinitely deferred and the whole of Western epistemology was shot through with the contradictions of its own deconstruction, then nothing finally meant anything. Logic perpetuated the lie of its own internal coherence, and human reason itself was complicit. Since “truth” was never universal but only conditional, categories I had heretofore considered stable became contingent. Authors went suddenly extinct. Texts lost their lease on meaning, but everything was now a text. The reasons why I loved literature—and why I had decided to go to graduate school—were exposed, one by one, as either incoherent or puerile. To accept this thinking felt like betraying myself, except that

I was also learning that betraying myself was impossible, given that any concept of “self” I had was merely a construction hiding the fact that, at bottom, there was no “self” to betray. It all seemed awful to me, but given the number of adherents with tenured positions in the department, it also seemed to be the current (and therefore best) explanation about how to study literature available to those in the know. Overwhelmed and unable to muster an argument, I adopted these new theoretical positions uncritically.

My graduate-school conversion was debasing because it required disavowing so much of what convinced me to pursue graduate studies in the first place. My love of literature had landed me in a critical theory seminar that revealed my relationship with writers and their fiction as fraudulent or naïve. I found myself too ready to parrot as gospel truth the ideas of theorists I’d only recently read, even though their arguments felt wrong. The most destabilizing of poststructuralism’s conclusions was the impossibility of the human, or at least the notion that there was a stable, unproblematic category called “the human.” Taken literally, the idea that there is nothing that properly belongs only to the domain of the human had rather unsettling existential consequences; to say I was “fixated” on them would not be a mischaracterization.9

This is evident when I look back at my writing from the period; it even shows up my application to the English Graduate program at Florida, in which my Statement of Purpose claims I intend to

“contribute to the rehabilitation of a critical Enlightenment humanism…that was abandoned before its insight and utility had been exhausted” (1-2).

9 I refer here to the usual suspects: Derrida’s “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” and Of Grammatology, Foucault’s “What Is an Author?” and History of Sexuality, de Man’s “Semiology and Rhetoric,” Barthes’s “The Death of the Author” and “From Work to Text,” and Lacan’s “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience”—all of which were conveniently anthologized in a 2,075-page page-turner ominously titled The Critical Tradition.

Like me, Wallace struggled with poststructuralist claims about language and meaning, which clashed, in his case, with his prescriptivist upbringing. A double major in philosophy and creative writing, he wanted to write witty, ironic, contemporary fiction. And what excited him about literature came from his courses in critical theory, not writing workshops. Unconcerned with character or narrative development, which he saw as outmoded elements of fiction, Wallace instead chose to foreground his theoretical concerns. His decision to do so, like my own early- grad school theory conversion, was to have long-lasting consequences.

Infinite Jest: Wallace as Wake-Up Call

I first encountered the name David Foster Wallace via his New York Times obituary, two days after his suicide on September 12th of 2008. It was the first of several memorials I would read in the days and weeks that followed. Among the online commemorations that appeared spontaneously as the news of Wallace’s death spread, one, hosted by McSweeney’s and simply titled “Memories of David Foster Wallace,” stands out in my recollection for both the breadth of its contributors and the depth of feeling they professed. The list of remembrances grew daily, with stories posted by people ranging from Wallace’s former students to the editor of The Paris

Review, who wrote that “David Foster Wallace changed the way we write and read.” Dave

Eggers called his writing “world-changing.” Zadie Smith wrote that the David Wallace she’d met had, in person, “a great purity,” that spilled over into his fiction: “It was the exact same purity one finds in the books: If we must say something, let’s at least only say true things. The principle of his fiction, as I understand it. It’s what made his books so beautiful to me, and so essential. He was an actual genius, which is as rare in literature as being kind—and he was that, too. He was my favourite, my literary hero” (“Memories” 49). I had never seen such uniformly high praise for a contemporary author, and haven’t since.

If my Amazon order history is a credible witness, I received a copy of Infinite Jest on

October 2nd of 2008—less than a month after Wallace took his life. But that fall was unusually hectic; it was the second semester of my MA, and the aggregate effect of my seminars, teaching,

GRE prep, and PhD applications was that I ended up with both walking- and garden-variety pneumonia. And so my copy of Infinite Jest sat on my nightstand, bookmarked at around page

60, because shelving it would have meant admitting defeat.

Almost three years later, 450 miles south of where I’d stopped reading it, Wallace’s big novel was still on my nightstand when I joined a UF graduate student group-read of Infinite Jest.

The goal was to get through all 1,100 pages over the course of the 2011 summer semester.

Nearly all of us had started the novel before. No one had finished it. We imposed the usual reading-group requirements in an attempt to keep everyone honest and on schedule.

Before the first group-email deadline arrived, Wallace’s novel exposed my usual reading habits as deficient. My customary scanning of uninteresting sections without comprehension was replaced by a note-taking habit that approached the compulsive. Dictionaries were bought, found lacking, and returned for heavier editions. By the end of the summer, I had filled two composition notebooks with definitions and character schemas to help me keep track of the book’s narrative shifts. Obscure references were hunted down: Norse mythology, cosmology, the history of optics, auteur theory. I brushed up on enough calculus to make sense of Wallace’s math metaphors. Fear of missing some reference, some connection, driven by an unexpected engagement with the novel, I started to keep weird hours, eventually wrecking my sleep cycle because of the ideal reading conditions during early AM sessions when distractions were minimal and I could really dig in.

At times, reading Wallace’s prose in my head-voice felt frustratingly familiar, like recognizing a face whose name remains just beyond recollection. I eventually realized that what it most sounded like was the voice I talked to myself with—only a much smarter, much more considerate version of it. And it turns out I wasn’t the only one whose inner monologue got hijacked. In his McSweeney’s remembrance, Timothy Krieder wrote: “[Wallace’s authorial voice] is always in my head like a conscience, reminding me when I forfeit fairness for humor or compromise my intellectual integrity for a good punch line. Now that he’s gone, I feel like I have to try harder” (“Memories” 5). Michael Pietsch, Wallace’s last editor, said that Wallace had

“delineated the inside of the skull, the convoluted self-talk we all carry on constantly, in a way that no writer ever has” (Five Dials 11). Wallace’s own personal brain-voice intrudes into his narratives with a consistency that has definite effects on readers. One of those effects is that it imbues his writing with a sense of sincerity.

In Wallace, I had found an author who seemed to be able to countenance theory and still write resonant, serious fiction. His writing showed me that it was possible to think through the paradoxes of theory that felt gut-level wrong. In Infinite Jest, I saw that those dire proclamations of poststructuralism about authorial demise that I’d parroted through gritted teeth weren’t unassailable: here was a writer—though he was undeniably dead—whose authorial presence was nonetheless palpably more real than anyone I’d ever read.

In the growing secondary literature on David Foster Wallace and his contemporaries, critics often consider Wallace the inaugural figure in a trend in American fiction after modernism collectively referred to as “The New Sincerity.”10 But Kelly, in an essay that surveys trends in

10A term first applied to Wallace’s work by Adam Kelly in his essay “David Foster Wallace and the New Sincerity in American Fiction” (2010), though others quickly took the appellation and ran with it. A hardly exhaustive list would include at least: Adam Kirsch’s “The Importance of Being Earnest” in New Republic 242.12 (2011): 20-26, Allard Den Dulk’s Existentialist Engagement in Wallace, Eggers and Foer (2014), Iain Williams’s “(New) Sincerity

sincerity from Lionel Trilling to Wallace, points out that any current wave of sincerity in

American fiction would be better described as resurgent than new. Kelly also points out a crucial caveat concerning contemporary claims of sincerity, one made by Erst van Alphen and Mieke

Bal in The Rhetoric of Sincerity: that in a post-theory epoch, “the issue of sincerity is no longer one of ‘being’ sincere but ‘doing’ sincerity” (qtd. in “Dialectic”). The paradox of post poststructuralist fiction that is both authentic and other-directed is perhaps what unifies writers like Michael Chabon, Dave Eggers, Junot Díaz, Jennifer Egan, Jonathan Franzen, Jonathan

Safran Foer, and Zadie Smith under the “New Sincerity” banner. Writing sincere, non-winking, genuinely-trying-to-connect-with-the-reader-in-meaningful-ways fiction for an audience who understands writers as “author figures” presents its own challenges. Additional complications necessarily arise from trying to write fiction that critically engages readers in an American moment when the default mode of communication tends toward the ironic: Irony modulates our judgements of sincerity because irony’s basic essence is that what is said is not what is meant.

How is a reader to know which authors are “being sincere” and which are “doing sincerity”? Is there a difference? Whatever formal characteristics these “New Sincerity” writers share, they all wrestle with questions of narrative sincerity.

The most comprehensive critical treatment of the “New Sincerity” is found in Adam

Kelly’s work, and his essay “Dialectic of Sincerity: Lionel Trilling and David Foster Wallace” situates Wallace within a tradition of literary sincerity in American fiction that stretches back to the 1950s. Kelly draws on Lionel Trilling’s argument in Sincerity and Authenticity (1971), the

in David Foster Wallace's ‘Octet’” in Critique 56.3 (2015): 299-314, Lucas Thompson’s “‘Sincerity with a Motive’: Literary Manipulation in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest” in Critique 57.4(2016): 359-373, Thomas Winningham’s “‘Author Here’: David Foster Wallace and the Post-metafictional Paradox” in Critique 56.6 (2015): 467-479, and the forthcoming Postirony: The Nonfictional Literature of David Foster Wallace and Dave Eggers by Lukas Hoffman.

central claim of which was that (at the time it appeared) late twentieth-century identity existed in a paradoxical state: as a private authenticity that can only express itself through self-conscious public displays of sincerity. Kelly’s “Dialectic of Sincerity” names the discursive relationship between inner and outer selves to the truth. He agrees with Trilling that “authenticity” names the concept of being true to a pre-existing self, then proceeds to bring Trilling’s historical account of sincerity and authenticity up to date in order to see if Trilling’s definitions still apply. Kelly’s method is to “present Trilling and Wallace as exemplifying two moments in…the dialectic of sincerity [and] that by tracking the historical movement from one writer to the other we can observe a shift in the cultural meaning of this concept” (“Dialectic”). But Kelly’s real contribution here is pointing out that because sincerity doesn’t have to presuppose any unified notion of the self, it gets around the objections raised about the kind of pre-existing self that

“authenticity” is premised on: “Sincerity exposes the self by asking for a response from the other—unlike authenticity, it does not imply the autonomy of the self” (“Dialectic”).

Said another way, sincerity is inherently social: it requires an other, whereas authenticity does not. One can be “authentic” in isolation, but we would not speak of being sincere in the same fashion. Being sincere also involves an ethical or moral dimension in that “sincerity” tends to connote a well-intentioned actor. Conversely, we characterize the discovery of someone’s selfish or hurtful motivations as revealing her “authentic” rather than her “sincere” character.

But whereas for Trilling, sincerity meant a simple “congruence between avowal and actual feeling,” for Wallace and those writers he influenced, achieving this type of sincerity in readers’ minds proved more difficult (Trilling 2). Inundated with corporate advertising designed to elicit trust, any contemporary writer attempting a sincere connection with the reader must necessarily overcome our natural skepticism. To achieve this kind of sincerity, readers must feel

they’ve been given access to a part of the writer’s self that she would rather remain hidden or that she has unwittingly revealed. This, Kelly states, is a kind of sincerity that “dissimulates a more basic complexity.… This is a theory of language entirely other to the one that undergirds…Trilling’s understanding of sincerity, and it implies that language can betray the self rather than enable its expression (“Dialectic” 35).

Even when we don’t completely agree with Wallace’s conclusions, his sincerity is never in doubt because he reproduces his mental route to those conclusions in such detail. It is analogous to the credit earned by students who heed the math-teacher directive “show your work.” In the classroom, an incorrect proof has no value; but the record of how a student arrived at an incorrect answer counts for something. The reason for this is not so much the gratification of an instructor’s vanity or reinforcement of teacherly authority so much as making sure that the lesson has been understood. For a teacher, the real classroom value of “showing your work” is what it affords them as teachers: the ability to point out for students exactly where in the process of solving a problem their thinking went wrong.

Infinite Jest was the teacher I needed. My progress toward completing a dissertation was in danger of stalling. Struggling to find a subject that could be sustained for the required length and on the verge of abandoning my own stated reasons for applying to the program, I was all but convinced that my only recourse was to attempt a boilerplate, theoretical-angle-plus-text approach to my writing project—whatever my level of (dis)interest.

In Wallace’s writing, I had found the literary evidence to articulate a response to the poststructuralist claims I had been unable to rebut since my first graduate-level theory seminar.

Again, a large part of why Infinite Jest resonated with me so deeply has to do with the fidelity with which it reproduces its author’s thought processes and his self-conscious doubts over

sharing that process with the reader. Wallace’s narrative chips away at our conditioned skepticism for almost 1,100 pages, and by the time it concludes, we feel like a participant in a dialogue rather than the object of a sermon; the overall impression is not that Wallace is trying to impress or convince but that he’s trying to help. This genuine concern is the kernel of Infinite

Jest’s unimpeachable sincerity: it is an attempt to create a space for dialogue between reader and writer in an irony-saturated culture of detachment and apathy. Wallace makes an argument against the death of the author not by devoting any narrative space to explicating theory, but by making the author undeniably present—and alive—for the reader. It reclaims textual meaning not through tedious theoretical convolutions, but by asking the reader to participate.

After I finished Infinite Jest, I immediately sought out Wallace’s other novels, only to find that he had only published one—his first novel, The Broom of the System. What I didn’t know was that Infinite Jest was a reworking of what Wallace had come to understand as his first novel’s failures. Chief among these failures was a narrative reliance on outside authority, and in

The Broom of the System, this outside authority manifests itself by sandbagging the novel’s frenzied formal shifts with overlong narrative rehearsals of theoretical and philosophical arguments lifted from Derrida and Wittgenstein.

Theory Addiction

As with addictions to alcohol, drugs, sex, gambling, or other behaviors commonly addressed by 12-step programs, “theory” is not, in itself, an inherent vice. As an analytical lens, theory has proven itself a useful tool in the hands of careful practitioners. But like other habit- forming vices, when indulged to excess, theory often distorts rather than clarifies. As noted in the literature available at 12-Step meetings or by the recovering addicts who share their stories during them will attest, the trouble begins at the point that “use of” becomes “reliance on.”

Reliance here can be used interchangeably with “need,” meaning “an inability to go without,”

and those parts of an addict’s life that are marginalized by or prioritized below her addiction are its cost.

At best, the unskilled application of critical theory leads to unsound reasoning and unwarranted conclusions. At worst, the theory-addicted critic ends up locked into a bad faith feedback loop of abstraction and jargon, losing sight of the original object of study altogether. In this case, the critic’s final contribution to the matter in question is to make it not more but less clear—though for the critic who is unconcerned with how his theory’s actual praxis affects others, clarity seems to matter very little. Theory addiction imposes similar costs on the fiction writer, and Wallace’s first theory-addicted novel sacrifices its formal and thematic cohesion— and more importantly any consideration of its readers—for theoretical sermonizing in hopes that what its author lacked in traditional fictional craft could be made up for by substituting impenetrable jargon.

In “The Nature of the Fun” (2007), Wallace writes about what I’ve termed the “binge” stage of his writing: “In the beginning, when you first start out trying to write fiction, the whole endeavor’s about fun. You don’t expect anybody else to read it. You’re writing almost wholly to get yourself off. To enable your own fantasies and deviant logics and to escape or transform parts of yourself you don’t like. And it works—and it’s terrific fun” (196-197).

Wallace complicates my notion of the theory addict by rejecting certain edicts of the twelve-step programs he used to recover from his substance addictions, instead fashioning his own synthetic or hermeneutic process. Wallace explains that as a writer, he had to work backward to the original impulse of his writing: the “fun.” But in working back to it, he found that the “fun” had been transformed: it was now a disciplined fun, hard-won by experience. And it far outstripped the selfish, onanistic, or seductive fun that marked his earlier period, in which

Wallace writes “about 90+ percent of the stuff you’re writing is motivated and informed by an overwhelming need to be liked” (197-198).

Wallace’s recovery from the addictive and unhealthy habit of “writing to be liked” was accomplished by pragmatic elimination: Instead of trying to write without theory, he instituted strict limits on the use of theory based on his evaluation of its narrative use. In this way,

Wallace’s theory recovery excised the harmful parts of his addictive behavior without having to hold the useful parts of his established writing habits under erasure because of their association with theory.

To offer an explanation for the vast differences between Wallace’s first and second novels, my project’s examines two recurring figures in Wallace’s fiction: Ludwig Wittgenstein and William James, whose work I argue helped Wallace overcome his theory-addicted writing habits. Wittgenstein’s influence on Wallace is well documented in the secondary literature, though generally only with regard to The Broom of the System. But references to William James are rare, and an account of how James’s pragmatic approach to philosophy and his influence on the doctrine of Alcoholics Anonymous—in which program Wallace would begin his deeper engagement with James’s ideas—shaped Wallace’s mature fiction remains unaccounted for.

Common to Wittgenstein and James is their assertion—contrary to established disciplinary practice—that works of philosophy necessarily admit something of the character of their authors, and that those admissions have worth as evaluative criteria. This is because philosophy, for these two thinkers, did not principally belong to the realm of the theoretical. For

Wittgenstein as for James, the work of a philosopher was not just theory but praxis. As

Wittgenstein puts it: “What is the use of philosophy…if it does not improve your thinking about the important questions of everyday life?” (Perloff 1).

Wittgenstein and James both understand their philosophical writing as corrective texts meant to resolve longstanding paradoxes of thought that had for too long left philosophers’ thinking paralyzed, unable to move the discipline forward. Wittgenstein’s method for unraveling a paradox was to recast unanswerable questions as problems of language. Specifically,

Wittgenstein felt the problem was that philosophers asked questions before completely understanding the meaning of the words they employed in asking. Wittgenstein’s corrective idea is that careful examination of those questions in philosophy that lead to paradoxes will eventually reveal an error in the questions’ language that, once resolved, removes the impasse.

James discusses his pragmatic method for resolving the paradoxical in several of his texts, but, not surprisingly, it finds its most thorough exposition in Pragmatism. For James, the pragmatic way to judge between what appear to be equally viable alternatives is by evaluating their consequences. If we can discern no difference between the possible outcomes, then functionally, there is no practical difference, and therefore there is no point in further discussion of the matter.

Central to both thinkers, then, is this notion of “use value” as it relates to meaning. In

Pragmatism, James explains that the pragmatic method first suggested itself when a group of his friends asked him to settle a dispute by casting the deciding vote. In this argument, everything came down to what was meant by the preposition “around”—or, more specifically, what was meant by that particular use of “around.” Both sides interpreted “around” to mean something different, but neither side’s use of “around” was technically incorrect; given that both uses were sound, James’s solutions was to cast his vote based on the consequences of taking each side’s interpretation to its logical conclusion: “The pragmatic method in such cases is to try to interpret each notion by tracing its respective practical consequences.”

Much of Wallace’s mature writing is about the difficulty of choosing in the absence of criteria by which to determine a correct decision. He was famously obsessed with double-bind situations in which the consequences of either choice are equally undesirable. More fundamentally, the engine of nearly all of his work is the figure of the paradox. And for Wallace, there was no more difficult paradox than having to decide between competing truths. He saw his historical moment as a writer as plagued by such a paradox: how to write serious literature that attempted a sincere conversation between writer and reader after what postmodernism had revealed about the incoherent natures of “authors” and “selves.”

Toward the end of his career, Wallace explicitly addresses the difficulty of choosing between equally-viable alternatives when he writes that “not all paradoxes have to be paralyzing” (“Nature” 198). Wallace knew that dwelling in the paradox or getting lost in his own abstract thinking led to inaction. Having hit bottom in his personal history of his substance abuse, Wallace knows that inaction when a choice is required can mean death. Ironically, what ended up helping him break the cycle of paralytic, addicted thinking was another paradox, one he discovered in recovery. “Keep coming back; it works it you work it” is the closing benediction at

AA meetings. Stated as an English sentence, it is infuriatingly vague and contradictory. But its profound usefulness for Wallace was not found in its linguistic expression, but rather in the routinized praxis of application. In recovery, Wallace initially chafed at what he felt were clichés of recovery-speak. But he was also confronted with the undeniable fact that though recovery’s clichés were logically incoherent, if he focused on following their advice rather than picking it apart, the clichés kept him sober. It is this realization that informs Wallace’s mature work ethic.

Wallace found that with his writing as with his recovery from substance abuse, the trick was to keep coming back, to keep grinding at the unglamorous routine.

In a little-known 1996 interview, just after the publication of Infinite Jest, Wallace described how his writing approach had evolved since Broom: “Now, ten years later, I understand that people read for intellectual reasons and emotions. I’m interested in a marriage of the two. Before, I wanted to throw out the emotional in favor of the technical. Now, I would get rid of the technique to save the emotion.”11 But Wallace doesn’t end up sacrificing one for the other; he manages both. And he does this by creating characters who are clearly representations of competing ideas—yet who are alive enough to engage the reader well beyond the end of the text.

Compared to The Broom of the System, Infinite Jest’s diffuse and subtle use of theory represents an order-of-magnitude jump in sophistication. Broom’s diegetic world distills the consequences of Wittgenstein and Derrida’s writing into an absurd joke with a glib punchline:

“The truth is that there’s no difference between a life and a story” (Broom 120). The latter novel moves beyond simple theorist-ventriloquizing into a maximalist narrative that dramatizes the logical consequences of theory in terms of real human cost: isolation, loneliness, depression, addiction. This is a novel written by a veteran sponsor, not by someone still working the intermediate steps—and accordingly, it offers sound advice on how to make difficult choices by example.

Chapter Outline

Chapter 2, “Theory Binge: The Broom of the System as Bender,” examines Wallace’s first attempt at a novelistic treatment of the themes that obsessed his previous work in philosophy: the isolation of solipsism inherent in the “problem of other minds” and determinism’s negation of free will. I proceed by considering the theoretical underpinnings of Wallace’s first novel, a

11 Speak Magazine Spring 1996: pp. 41–42

framework that pits two thinkers—Derrida and Wittgenstein—against one another, but which fails to declare a winner. I propose that the reason for the novel’s theoretical stalemate and critics’ dismissive consensus of it have a common root. Equally concerned with demonstrating his intellectual ability and masking his shallow engagement with critical theory, Wallace depends on formal cleverness and verbal dexterity to divert the reader’s attention from his superficial rehearsals of other thinkers’ complex thought. Consequently, the novel’s characters function primarily as mouthpieces for the theorists they stand in for. As a stage in the recovery narrative, Broom corresponds to the beginning of the theory-addict’s trajectory. In the vernacular of twelve-step programs like Alcoholics Anonymous, Broom is a novel written before the addict admits he has a problem. Hobbled by its bloodless engagement with complex ideas, Broom sacrifices the possibility of sincere dialogue with its readers, content instead to distract its audience with a sort of theoretical and formal sleight-of-hand.

Chapter 3, “Wallace’s Ethical Turn: Wittgenstein’s Mistress as Hitting Bottom,” looks at the inter-novel period between The Broom of the System and Infinite Jest as the theory-addict’s experience of hitting bottom. It is the absolute nadir of the addict’s narrative, the “what happened,” during which the addict “hits bottom.” In twelve-step culture, bottoming out is marked by a dual distinction: It is the bleakest point on the timeline—the point at which the inevitable spiral of an unsustainable addiction finally culminates in a catastrophic event in the addict’s life—but it also marks a new beginning. The mental plasticity that results from the vulnerability and hopelessness brought on by profound loss is the necessary condition for an addict’s epiphanic identification of self-as-addict, the departure point at which help is finally sought and recovery can begin.

In the wake of Broom, Wallace found himself at the intersection of his increasingly disruptive substance abuse, mental health-related hospitalizations, and the embarrassment of reading David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress. By November of 1989, he was living at

Granada House, a supervised facility for recovering addicts. It is during this period that

Wallace’s writing approach underwent a sort of value-epiphany, shifting from a reliance on outside theoretical authority and formal showmanship to an other-focused attempt at meaningful human connection.

Through my biographical reading of Wallace’s correspondence, interviews, and criticism, together with a close reading of his essay on Markson’s novel Wittgenstein’s Mistress, which claims that novel serves as a template for his fiction from that point on, I outline the genesis of

Wallace’s mature ethic by identifying sources from which he transposed the paradoxical maxims of recovery culture into his writing, fashioning an ethic of transparent self-awareness and routinized discipline. As Wallace emerged from this transformative second period, his writing progressed from that of a brilliant student eager to showcase his abilities into a mature author who could focus those abilities to faithfully render and diagnose difficult parts of American culture.

Chapter 4, “Big Books: Infinite Jest and the Literature of Recovery,” leverages Wallace’s glowing critical appraisal of Markson’s novel—he once punched a housemate in the nose for criticizing it—as a list of formal requirements for his own writing moving forward, building on

Chapter 3’s examination of Broom’s failure to meaningfully engage with Wittgenstein and

Derrida’s ideas. The close readings in Chapter 4 explore how, instead of abandoning it completely, Wallace chose to rework this content in his second novel and offers an explanation as to why the result was so vastly different.

Chapter 5, “Afterword: David Foster Wallace’s Transformative Gifts and the Labor of

Gratitude,” is intended as a coda to my larger study of the evolving ethical dimensions of

Wallace’s writing. In it, I make use of Lewis Hyde’s figuration of “gift economies” to read

Wallace’s 2006 Kenyon College commencement address, foregrounding the intersections between Hyde, Wallace, and Alcoholics Anonymous.12 I then turn to a final account of my experience with specific Wallace communities and the ways that they function as what Hyde calls “labors of gratitude.”

12 Chapter 5 makes use of Hyde’s interpretive framework as outlined in his text The Gift: How the Creative Spirit Transforms the World (1983).

CHAPTER 2 THEORY BINGE: THE BROOM OF THE SYSTEM AS BENDER

If anyone is unwilling to descend into himself, because this is too painful, he will remain superficial in his writing.… If I perform to myself, then it’s this that the style expresses. And then the style cannot be my own. If you are unwilling to know what you are, your writing is a form of deceit.

—Ludwig Wittgenstein Recollections of Wittgenstein1

“I’d Grown Up Inside Vectors, Lines”

Chapter 2 examines the origins of David Foster Wallace’s theory- and substance addictions to better understand why The Broom of the System fails to foster the kind of relationship with readers that characterizes Wallace’s later work. I proceed by identifying a set of values and behavioral habits that shape Wallace’s experience during his early childhood in suburban Illinois. I then trace these related biographical elements’ influence on Wallace’s fiction—specifically on the development of Wallace’s first novel—from its inception as a fiction thesis at Amherst. This early novel attempts to engage with theoretical questions about the degree to which experience is constituted by language. The novel’s principal, Lenore, is convinced rather literally by her grandmother, a former student of the philosopher Ludwig

Wittgenstein, that her life amounts to nothing more than what can be said about it. Lenore’s unease over the possibility that her life is merely a linguistic construct is the primary engine driving what little plotting the novel includes, and ends up serving as a rather long-winded setup to the joke Wallace is driving at (she’s a literal character in a literal novel, so of course she’s only constituted only by others’ language). Ultimately, this first attempt at long form fiction

1 Chapter 2’s epigraph is drawn from Rhees, Rush. “Postscript.” Recollections of Wittgenstein, edited by Rush Rhees, Oxford UP, 1984, p. 174.

served to showcase Wallace’s verbal and stylistic skills, but also represents the kind of shallow engagement with the philosophical and theoretical questions he would later revisit in earnest.

David Foster Wallace was born in Ithaca, New York, on 21 February, 1962. Sally Foster,

David’s mother, is an alumna of Mount Holyoke and the first in her family to earn a college degree. James D. Wallace had done his undergraduate work at Amherst and was still a graduate student in philosophy at Cornell when his son was born. After James finished his PhD the following year, he joined the philosophy faculty at the University of Illinois at Urbana-

Champaign as an assistant professor, and the young Wallace family moved from New York to

Illinois. David’s sister, Amy, was born a year later.

The Wallace home was one of prescribed stability, and its order was enforced by regimentation. Household responsibilities were assigned to parents and children alike. Rules were important; both Sally and James instilled the value of structured habits from an early age.

Schedules were set and enforced for nearly everything: after school was over, David and Amy completed their homework before dinner commenced at 5:45 p.m. Following the evening meal,

James read to the children, after which they were allowed “fifteen minutes each in their beds to talk to Sally about anything that was on their minds” (Max 2). 8:30 p.m. meant bedtime for

David and Amy, though the parents’ routines weren’t concluded until after the 10:00 news broadcast when “Jim would turn the lights out at 10:30 p.m. exactly.” The stricture was something that David Foster Wallace naturally enjoyed. To him, “the household was a perfect, smoothly running machine” (2).

Wallace’s biographer, D. T. Max, characterizes his subject’s childhood as “happy and ordinary,” noting that Wallace “thought of himself as normal—and was normal. But he was also identifiably from a talented family, one in love, not unlike Salinger’s Glass family, with the

ability to impose their notional world on the real one” (4). It is an apt comparison; like J. D.

Salinger’s fictional Glass family, the Wallaces had their own eccentrics and troubled characters: academics (both MFAs and PhDs), writers, poets, narcissists—not to mention suicides; both

Sally Wallace’s uncle and her sister had ended their own lives. And as with the Glass children,

David Wallace’s emotional and psychological problems stemmed at least in part from the overeducation of his naturally cerebral, abstract mind. The youngest sibling in the Glass family,

Franny, suffers an existential breakdown at college and is forced to suspend her studies while she recuperates in her childhood home. Like Franny, David Foster Wallace’s time at college was interrupted by mental health crises that sent him back to the house he’d grown up in. Another of

Salinger’s fictional children, Seymour Glass, survives an attempt to kill himself2 in one story, only to commit suicide in another.3 David Foster Wallace’s life was likewise punctuated by suicide attempts, several of which required hospitalization.

Though his father set the schedule, David Wallace’s mother, with whom he had a closer relationship, imposed her own kind of order through her enthusiasm for language. As the first member of her family to attend college, David’s mother’s insistence on grammatical precision was perhaps an outward marker of the differentiation she felt her education afforded her. An

English teacher and author of the textbook Practically Painless English, Sally Foster Wallace enforced strict linguistic rules in a rather idiosyncratic fashion. As Wallace would later recall in an essay for Harper’s:

Family suppers often involved a game: if one of us children made a usage error, Mom would pretend to have a coughing fit that would go on and on until the relevant child had identified the relevant error and corrected it. It was all very self- ironic and lighthearted; but still, looking back, it seems a bit excessive to pretend

2 Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters, published in The New Yorker, November 19, 1955

3 “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” published in The New Yorker, January 31, 1948

that your small child is actually denying you oxygen by speaking incorrectly. (“Authority” 71)

But as a child, if Wallace saw his mother’s habits as excessive, they also endeared her to him.

They were further evidence of their bond: “The intimation that so much was at stake in each utterance thrilled David, and added to the excitement of having a gifted mother” (Max 3).

However, the young David Wallace was learning something beyond the importance of promptness or English grammar from his adherence to these early rules and routines: he was also discovering how to make his parents proud, something that meant a great deal emotionally to him. Sally Wallace’s approval was especially important: “For David, his mother was the center of the universe” (2). Gifted student that he was, Wallace discovered early that his academic success was a reliable method for eliciting his mother’s praise.

As a young student at Yankee Ridge elementary, David Foster Wallace was both competitive and precocious. He won academic awards but frequently infuriated his teachers with his questioning. He spent a lot of his time reading, a habit his mother encouraged. Wallace got his picture in the local paper twice in the sixth grade, once for his performance in a regional knowledge bowl, and again for a poem that had won him a $50 prize. Wallace tried out for little league baseball and flag football; he made both teams.

It was around this point—at nine or ten years old—that Wallace would later say he began to experience the first symptoms of the mental illness that would reoccur sporadically for the rest of his life. Though Wallace says he experienced the onset of “depressive, clinically anxious feelings” and developed irrational fears of things like insects, neither his parents nor his sister noticed that Wallace was ill at this time. Either way, Wallace didn’t tell his family about his symptoms, which Max reasons was a function of his crippling insecurity and feelings of

inadequacy coupled with the perceived expectations of his accomplished parents—especially his mother.

On more than one occasion, Sally Wallace’s unexpected and sudden absence from the

Wallace home corresponds with the onset of her son’s psychological problems. Wallace located this first onset of symptoms to the summer of either 1971 or 1972, the latter of which would have been the year Max says Sally Wallace “began teaching English full-time at Parkland Community college” (5). Abrupt changes to Wallace’s established routines was not something he tolerated well. Max makes several references to this need for structure, noting that “the young man may also have been responding to the environment he had grown up in, to the wide-open spaces and unstructured world of late-1970s midwestern America. If he was furtive or anxious, perhaps it was in part because he had a hard time figuring out what the rules were” (13), that “Wallace found he was happier…He had his routines down” (20), and that Wallace “was happiest when things were predictable, when his work was under control and the people around him familiar…he quickly developed routines” (16). By his freshman year of high school, Wallace had found coping mechanisms to deal with his recurrent anxiety: “Wallace made two important discoveries in his early teen years: tennis and marijuana. These were the twin helpers that carried him through high school” (8). Wallace found that the pot helped not only with his anxiety, but his studies: he found it easier to concentrate on his schoolwork. This discovery, that he “liked to study high,” marks the beginning of Wallace’s self-medication (Max 18). And the increased absence of his mother—whose insistence on structure and rules he had internalized as a way to help cope with his anxiety and impose order on his own life—threatened the security of

Wallace’s most fundamental structure.

The caliber of Wallace’s intellect would become apparent to his friends, family and, teachers during the next four years, but the increase in mental horsepower came with a cost: as his thinking grew more sophisticated, so did his mental health problems. By Wallace’s junior year, Sally Wallace says that the symptoms of her son’s mental illness were beginning to emerge; the nausea that stemmed from his anxiety often caused him to skip class, though not enough to harm his grades or land him in trouble with school administration (12). Toward the end of his senior year, the problems that Wallace had managed to conceal had grown into something he could no longer keep hidden: “the anxiety that had been shimmering just below the surface of his life grew into full-blown panic attacks. He was not sure what set them off, but he saw that they quickly became endless loops, where he worried that people would notice he was panicking, and that in turn would make him panic more” (Max 12). As the attacks increased,

Wallace smoked more pot to calm his symptoms. His increased use was something that his parents tolerated; he could smoke at home without having to hide his habit.

Wallace didn’t talk to his parents about what he was feeling, and though she could tell something was wrong, his mother recalls of this period that “neither she nor her husband knew what to do about it, beyond letting their son stay home from school when he had to,” and that

“perhaps the problem would go away when he went to college” (13). This part of Sally

Wallace’s narrative raises some parental red flags, especially since both her sister and uncle had problems with mental illness that eventually led to suicide. It is also, however, a representative example of how literally James and Sally Wallace practiced the kind of coldly-academic liberalism they preached with regard to the importance of personal autonomy and individual responsibility. In highly-structured families like the Wallaces, this kind of autonomy often involves a unspoken prohibition against disrupting established routines or schedules by

demanding special attention, especially if you can address or resolve the problem on your own.

That Wallace continued to function at a high academic level— he was a member of the debate team, earned marks that put him close to the top of his class, and won Urbana High School’s prize that year for “best student writing”— may also have contributed to Sally and James

Wallace’s reticence to broach the subject with their son.

As graduation arrived, Wallace had established a cycle. Because acknowledging his mental health problems would disrupt the established order of family life at home—his most fundamental structure—he self-medicated to calm his anxiety and help him study, which studying in turn brought him both intellectual satisfaction and a level of academic achievement sufficient to evoke his parents’ pride in him. And as a bonus, the coping system he’d worked out made Wallace to feel he contributed to the solidity of the family structure. But around this time, the problems in Sally and James’s marriage—which had up to this point been understandably kept from David and Amy—began to show, and as their partnership broke down, Wallace’s anxiety increased. He compensated for the trouble at home the only way he knew how: by setting ever more difficult academic goals.

One of the first academic hurdles Wallace set up for himself was admission to a top school. Wallace had decided that “going to a prestigious private college was one of the ways the

Wallaces differed from some of their midwestern peers,” an idea inherited from his mother, who considered her status as the first of her family to go to college an integral part of her identity—a personal achievement she felt distinguished her from others. Since the naturally-competitive

Wallace wanted to top his mother’s achievement, he “told friends he was expected to follow in his father’s footsteps at Amherst, inventing a layer of pressure he hardly needed” (13) But James

Wallace’s remembers that “he thought Oberlin College might be a good match for his son” (13).

And in fact, Wallace went for a visit to Oberlin, but afterwards, he got so anxious that he threw up when he got back to the hotel (14). When he found out he could go to Amherst if he chose,

(because his father had gone to school there), the younger Wallace decided to not only attend

James’s alma mater but also to declare his father’s major as his own.

Wallace arrived at Amherst in the fall of 1980. It was an unfamiliar and disorienting place: he was a thousand miles from his family at an academically and economically-elite New

England college with a student body comprised almost entirely of other male4 students, all of whom Wallace felt looked the part in ways that he did not. His first semester at Amherst was a lonely one. The two pre-med students assigned as his roommates, Desai and Javit, both remember Wallace as a solitary person—unlike them, he had no visits from his family, and if he had made other friends, they never saw Wallace with them. Even his studying was antisocial:

Wallace spent most of his time in the library rather than in their two-room dormitory in Stearns

Hall (though the tarantula that Wallace’s roommate Desai brought with him might have had something to do with Wallace’s decision). Initially, Wallace made an effort to engage with them socially by going with them to the Amherst JV tennis team’s open practices, but as Javit and

Desai met other pre-med students, they separated themselves from Wallace. Feeling anxious among confident students who seemed to belong at Amherst, Wallace applied himself harder to his academics than he had previously: “Getting straight As, as he would later tell Amherst magazine, was “a way to hide from people,” (Schmeidel). But apart from helping with his anxiety by occupying his mind or fulfilling the responsibilities he felt his family expected of him,

Wallace also derived a good deal of personal satisfaction from his studies and from the respect his intellect commanded in the classroom—both from fellow students and professors. However,

4 Amherst’s first co-ed class had not yet graduated by the time Wallace got there (Max 16).

Wallace’s habit of getting high to help him study, which followed him to college, meant that as his academic effort increased, so must his drug use. Luckily, Wallace was able to “reestablish

[his] routine at Amherst with the two young men who lived down the hall from him” (18).

During that first semester, Wallace “dug into introductory courses in English, history, and political science,” along with an elective course titled “Evolution and Revolution” (18). Toward the end of his first semester, Wallace got to know a student who spent as much time in the library as he did—another freshman named Mark Costello. Through Costello, Wallace made a few more friends, but the closest of these during his time at Amherst, and the one he came to rely on for support, was Costello. The group established rigorous study hours together, before which

Wallace would frontload the caffeine content of his tea by doubling-up on teabags. When their group-study time ended, the freshmen would get together for shots of scotch to help them sleep, and so by the end of his freshman year, Wallace began to grow dependent on alcohol as part of his chemically-enhanced study regimen. As his first semester at Amherst concluded, Wallace earned three As and an A- in his courses and had expanded his circle of friends; things were going well for him both academically and socially (21). Coming back after Christmas break to begin his second freshman semester, Wallace had signed up for courses on twentieth-century

British poetry, Shakespeare, and Gothic literature. His roommate Desai was in the same

Shakespeare course and remembers the moment when he first had a realization about Wallace’s intellect after seeing him write a paper that received an A+ in under an hour: “I thought I was smarter. … Now I was getting a glimpse of how much he could accomplish” (19). Wallace capped off his first year at of college in the spring of 1981 by winning the prize Amherst awarded to the freshman with the highest GPA (19).

Wallace’s time at college alternated between peaks of academic achievement and long breaks spent away from college. His progress was interrupted twice by mental-health breakdowns, causing him to take the spring semester of 1982 and the fall semester of 1983 off.

Both times, Mark Costello—who beginning sophomore year was Wallace’s roommate and closest friend at Amherst—drove Wallace to catch his flight back home to Illinois. But apart from this pair of semesters, Wallace’s academic record at Amherst was nearly immaculate. In addition to the freshman GPA prize, won awards throughout college, including a scholarship for being Amherst’s “most promising philosophy student” (33), the award for the highest cumulative three-year GPA, and when Wallace graduated, he “received several more academic prizes, bringing his total awards to ten, likely an Amherst record” (50-51).

Beginning in his second year, Wallace began to take courses in his major, philosophy— courses in which he was particularly dominant, and in which he would earn a solid string of “A” marks. David Wallace enrolled in not only his father’s alma mater, but took coursework in the very same philosophy-department classrooms where his James D. Wallace had studied before earning his PhD at Cornell “under the direction of Normal Malcolm, a close friend and disciple of [the philosopher Ludwig] Wittgenstein” and then accepting a position at the University of

Illinois Champagne-Urbana, where he would become a full professor in the philosophy department (Ryerson 4). The younger Wallace’s preternatural capacity for sustained abstract thought was apparent from the beginning to his philosophy professors. It gave him an edge in the more complex courses in his major; in epistemology, a survey of various theories of knowledge taught by Willem DeVries, his professor later said of Wallace’s raw mental horsepower: “I don’t want to say he was scary but he made me work harder than any other student I’ve ever had”

(Max 19).

During the first semester of his sophomore year, in the fall of 1981, Wallace took classes in both his parents’ disciplines: course in English (earning and A) and an introduction to philosophy course (A+). But his attempts to elicit parental praise fizzled over the Christmas break when something happened at home that, when asked about—even by Mark Costello— made Wallace cagey; he would only describe the circumstances back in Illinois as “bad” (22).

Costello worried about the changes he saw in Wallace during the early part of the following spring semester; he was constantly enervated and said he thought about killing himself (22).

William Kennick, the professor of philosophy at Amherst who had been James Wallace’s mentor

(and was familiar with depression in his own family), noticed the shape David Wallace was in and took him to see a therapist. Shortly after Wallace finished the session, Costello returned to their suite to find his roommate with his bags packed. Asked why he was leaving, Wallace told him simply, “I don’t know. Something’s wrong with me” (22). Worried, Costello drove him to the bus station; from there, Wallace took a bus to the airport and flew home to Illinois. Back in

Urbana and living with his parents again, Wallace withdrew from his spring courses.

It was during this period away from Amherst—from early spring of 1982 through the end of summer break that year—that David Foster Wallace started writing fiction (23). But Wallace first needed time to decompress. While he recuperated in his old upstairs bedroom, clearly ill,

His parents continued to practice their laissez faire method of parental concern. Sally gives a peculiar description of what happened during this precarious period of her son’s mental health, saying that they “let Wallace come and go as he pleased,” and that she and James “didn’t press him,” because “we figured if he wanted to talk about it he’d talk about it.” (22) But Wallace did in fact need to talk to someone. He began to confide in his sister, Amy, who says her brother told her “how frightened and uncomfortable the world felt to him and how nothing seemed

meaningful anymore,” adding that he didn’t know who he was. One possible explanation for

Wallace’s parents’ unconcern for their son’s wellbeing is that their marriage had been deteriorating for some time. This tension in the Wallace family is likely the “bad” thing that happened over the previous Christmas break, and that Wallace refused to talk about with

Costello. Later, in early summer, Sally Wallace told her daughter she was moving out, asking her to serve as a proxy for relaying the news to her brother. His mother’s decision to leave without talking to him and her method of delivering the news of her departure both crushed and infuriated her son, and he “refused to visit her in her new home” (23). As the duration of Sally’s absence from the house grew, so did Wallace’s certainty that his parents’ marriage wasn’t likely to be repaired. He had taken for granted the stability and order that his mother’s routines and rule systems provided, and Wallace was forced to countenance the fact that structures around which he ordered his life—all of his coping systems, straight-A reward structures, and studious self- worth—had always been contingent on his relationship with his family, and especially with his mother. The destabilizing realization that his family had disintegrated was compounded by

Wallace’s inability to restore it no matter what amount of effort he put in. The cognitive dissonance produced by Wallace’s presence in the family house while also experiencing the absence of his family is reflected in the fiction he started writing around this time.

Wallace had written a few short, comedic stories when he was in high school, but had not tried his hand at it since, and this new impulse to write in the spring of 1982 seemed to come out of nowhere. When Wallace sent a letter to Costello informing him he intended to get serious about writing, Costello remembers that he “was impressed—he had no inkling either that his roommate wanted to write or could write fiction” (23). Wallace channeled the spiraling instability at home into a story about a “fictional bird that flies in ever-decreasing circles until it

disappears up its own ass” called “The Clang Birds” (23). In another, the betrayal he felt over his parents’ divorce surfaces as a narrative about an “existential gameshow” run by God, wherein

God—holding the only buzzer— asks contestants to answer impossible or paradoxical questions.

No one can win, and the game’s duration is infinite.

When Wallace came back to school in the fall of 1982, he and Costello revived Sabrina,

Amherst’s humor magazine, and started writing comedy together. Wallace’s mental health continued to improve. Wallace was taking three philosophy courses: the first part of William

Kennick’s three-semester-long survey of philosophy that covered the ancient to medieval periods, a Christian ethics seminar, and a course on logic. The logic course was where Wallace began to differentiate himself from his father as a philosophy student. His father’s work in philosophy dealt primarily with ethical and moral questions, and “thought little of the discipline”

Wallace had chosen. But Wallace was interested in the “special sort of buzz” that he got from logic. He characterized the buzz as one that came on while filling “half a notebook with gnarly attempted solutions” for a problem, and eventually stumbling onto the sudden realization of the correct, “gorgeously simple solution”—which when it hit, Wallace said—he “almost heard a

‘click’” (25). The difference between Wallace’s philosophy and his father’s, he said, was that

“my areas of interest were mathematical logic and semantics and stuff, which my dad thinks is kind of gibberish, so it's very weird. In a certain way, I'm following in Dad's footsteps, but I'm also doing the required, you know, thumbing the nose at the father thing. And the stuff—the stuff that I was doing was really more math than it was philosophy” (Rose). Given Wallace’s preference for well-defined criteria by which to excel, it should come as no surprise that his path in philosophy was one that tended toward logic.

As he progressed in junior year coursework in the spring semester of 1983, Costello and

Wallace were “becoming well known on campus because of the magazine” (27). The psychological and emotional symptoms that had sent Wallace home for a second time had once again improved. With Wallace’s new popularity came new friends, one of whom was Charlie

McLagan, who introduced Wallace to mushrooms, acid, and postmodern literature when he loaned him his copy of Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49. Wallace saw in this kind of writing a world that he recognized as his own: brainy, ironic, and littered with pop culture references, plus Lot 49 was funny—which dovetailed with the sort of lampoons he’d been writing for the magazine.

David Wallace came home for Amherst’s summer break in 1983 to find the family home in bad shape. His mother still gone, Wallace found that his father had “spent the year alone, keeping the radio on for company” (28). The Wallaces were now seeing a marriage therapist, and wanted their children to attend therapy sessions with them (28-29). Despite these efforts, Sally and James shortly informed their children of their plans to divorce. But Amy Wallace remembers that about a month after the divorce announcement, in a strange about-face, her mother moved back into the house. The Wallace children didn’t ask for an explanation, and neither of their parents offered one. Wallace spent that summer taking in as much postmodern fiction as he could get his hands on. He read Donald Barthleme’s “The Balloon” for the first time (29). By now,

Wallace had no doubt begun to see in the fragmented narratives of postmodern fiction a reality that more closely approximated his own experience, and he saw connections between the way the Barthleme’s story exposed its underpinnings with the technical way that his logic course had exposed the language behind philosophical questions worked.

By the end of summer 1983, Wallace had started seeing a doctor for his anxiety who prescribed the trycyclic antidepressant Tofranil to help with Wallace’s anxiety (32). Back at

Amherst for the fall 1983 semester, Wallace found the structures and routines he’d built there had taken a hit as well. With Costello gone, Wallace lost his claim on his old room, and in place of his familiar suite is assigned a bed in an eight-room dormitory. Having lost his support structure of his friends and living in uncomfortable, cramped quarters with strangers, Wallace’s anxiety once again morphed into a spiraling depression. Wallace contemplated suicide, but instead withdrew from school again and saw a psychiatrist (33). Away from college once again,

Wallace’s new doctor took him off Tofranil and prescribed “a different antidepressant” (34). The new medication was better at alleviating his symptoms and didn’t induce the apathy he experienced on the Tofranil. Thanks to his new medication, Wallace was feeling better than he had in a long time, and he readied himself for a return to Amherst and the conclusion of his studies there.

By the start of his senior year at Amherst in the spring of 1984, Wallace had already finished his philosophy thesis. Costello had just graduated double summa (he had completed two different honors theses: a study of the New Deal and a novel), and Wallace began diverting all his efforts into writing fiction. Besides being Wallace’s best friend and main emotional support,

Costello was also his relentless competitor, and each tried constantly to one-up the other’s academic efforts. It’s also not unlikely that Wallace’s competition with Costello served as a surrogate form of the achievement-based attempts to elicit praise from his family, whether the stand-in for his family was a professor on whose class assignments Wallace worked hard to best his roommate—or Costello himself. However, Wallace had additional reasons for attempting a fiction thesis besides breaking Costello’s record: the distraction it provided for his high-idling

mind, which Wallace knew that when left to its own devices tended to spin itself into anxious loops. With fiction, when Wallace finished a piece that satisfied him intellectually and creatively, it produced the “click” he used to get from working through problems in his logic courses, and when he was working at long stretches chasing fiction’s click, Wallace described the experience as produced an almost disembodying high in which “couldn’t feel [his] ass in the chair” (167).

And since writing a fiction thesis in addition to his modal logic thesis on Taylor’s fatalism was required to match—though not exceed—Mark Costello’s achievement of completing of not one but two honors theses (which hadn’t been done at Amherst in the forty years before Costello did it)—if Wallace couldn’t manage it, not only would he not beat Costello or tie him for first place.

He would come in second.

That semester, Wallace published “The Planet Trillaphon as It Stands in Relation to the

Bad Thing” in The Amherst Review.5 Though it is David Foster Wallace’s first piece of published fiction, any reader of Wallace’s work would recognize it as unmistakably his. It is the origin point of his recurring fictional treatments of depression, and in this early form is an intensely autobiographical account, including his mother’s characterization of his particular combination of depression and anxiety as a black hole with teeth (29). Stylistically, the early form of what would become his characteristic voice is recognizable for its intimate, spoken rhythm and long, subordinating-clause heavy sentences (though without violating the rules of grammatical syntax).

He was also taking his first creative writing course, taught by Alan Lelchuk, as well as a course in literary theory where he discovered, among other poststructuralist writers, Jacques Derrida. He found in Derrida a philosopher who cared about literature like he did; it is this ability to bridge the two disciplines that fascinated Wallace and made Derrida’s abstract arguments concerning

5 Volume XII, Spring 1984

the inherent contradictions of dyadic thinking, especially with regard to “presence vs. absence” and “self vs. other,” so important to him.

From Philosophy to Fiction

As I noted earlier, when David Foster Wallace began his coursework at Amherst in 1980, he pursued studies in philosophy, and this section examines the themes from his philosophy thesis in closer detail in order to draw attention to those themes when they appear later in his

English thesis. Wallace’s coursework included the standard surveys of philosophical thinkers’ systems taught by Kennick, but also other standard elements of a philosophy like epistemology, metaphysics, and ethics. But the philosophy course that most excited Wallace, as I remarked earlier, was logic. Logical philosophy is analogous to a kind of close reading in that it breaks philosophical arguments down into their assertions in order to examine exactly how the steps of the argument progress or to identify by such close scrutiny any problems in its reasoning.

The entirety of Wallace’s philosophy thesis is spent refuting an earlier argument by a philosopher named Richard Taylor. As James Ryerson explains in his introduction to Wallace’s undergraduate thesis, recently published under the title Fate, Time, & Language:

Wallace became troubled by a well-known paper called “Fatalism,” first published in 1962, in which the philosopher Richard Taylor advances a modern-day argument for an age-old metaphysical doctrine by that name. The fatalist contends, quite radically, that human actions and decisions have no influence on the future. Instead, in a seemingly backward way, the fatalist says it is how things are in the future that uniquely constrains what happens right now. (Ryerson 5-6)

The way Taylor arrived at these conclusions without violating any of the disciplinary rules of the modal logic it is written in is akin to the way that Zeno’s paradox operates without violating any rules of propositional logic (the kind of if-X-then-Y logic that a basic syllogism like “All men are mortal; Socrates is a man; Socrates will die” relies on): starting at point (A), in order to reach point (B), one must first reach point (C), located mid-way between points (A) and (B). But in

order to reach the mid-point (C), one must first reach point (D) located mid-way between points

(A) and (C). Because it takes a given amount of time to travel any given distance, and because there are always infinitely many points between a starting point and an endpoint, reaching the endpoint will necessarily take an infinite amount of time. While demonstrably false in praxis, the argument of Zeno’s paradox remains, on paper, in the language of propositional logic, unassailable. In modal logic, a “modal” is a word, like “often” in the phrase “Rob is often late for his writing deadline,” that qualifies the statement. Taylor’s argument, though easily refuted by common-sense measures, violates none of modal logic’s rules. Modal logic as a discipline is tasked with judgements of truth or falsity of specific types of modals: generally, those of possibility, necessity, and impossibility. Taylor’s argument is a special kind of modal dealing with qualifiers of time, temporal modalities. The implications of Taylor’s conclusions, that future events somehow determined the present, struck a chord with Wallace; as Ryerson notes, “There was a kind of anguish for Wallace in the prospect of a world so out of whack” (7). Taylor’s deductions disturbed him because they seemed to deny Wallace the agency to define and judge himself according to how well he satisfied pre-existing rules and criteria. It also presented a unique challenge that his competitive mind could not ignore: he could not merely advance a commonsensical argument to counter Taylor’s logic. To successfully counter a modal-logic argument, he had to abide by the constraints on which mathematical symbols were allowed to follow the rules particular to modal logic, those of testing the truth or falsity of claims about necessity or possibility.

Taylor and his adherents, with a stake in the continued solidity of modal logic as a workable and useful system of inquiry, wouldn’t accept an intuitive answer to the fatalist problem; appeals to common sense merely rejected the problem’s argument without disproving

its claims regarding free will. Wallace knew that a refutation would have to disprove Taylor’s argument on its own terms—and in its native idiom of modal logic. Enlisting help from other graduate students and his professors, Wallace devoted one of his two undergraduate honors theses to that very task and won the Amherst philosophy department’s top prize in the process.

About this accomplishment, James Ryerson offers the insight that, besides the satisfaction of having equaled his father’s earlier accomplishment (James Wallace won the same prize in 1959), that “The real accomplishment of Wallace’s thesis, however, was not technical or argumentative but more like a moral victory” (13). And in his introduction to Wallace’s Fate, Time, and

Language: An Essay on Free Will, Ryerson again touches on the Wallace father-son dynamic:

“As Wallace would later admit, his intellectual leanings in those years [at Amherst] may have been influenced by a wish to differentiate himself from his father”—whereas James Wallace was interested in philosophical inquiries into moral and ethical questions of value, his son specialized in mathematical logic and the philosophy of language.6 But in the end, their writing shares a common obsession with the same problems—the difficulties of determining value and the question of sincerity—which are always palpable in David Foster Wallace’s fiction.

But as Wallace finished his refutation of fatalism, he became increasingly worried about another philosopher’s writing that elicited the same sense of gut-level unease he felt on first reading Taylor’s argument (Ryerson 20). The source of Wallace’s post-Taylor anxiety was

Ludwig Wittgenstein, a philosopher whose thematic focus on language’s ability to foreclose possibility has obvious resonances with Taylor’s fatalism. Specifically, the problem in

Wittgenstein that concerned Wallace, and which would become a recurrent theme in Wallace’s writing, occurs in Wittgenstein’s posthumous work, the Philosophical Investigations. The

6 His “Pleasure as an End of Action,” published in a 1966 issue of American Philosophical Quarterly, has eerie resonances with the filmic “entertainment” in Infinite Jest.

Investigations, along with his earlier work, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, comprise the only two sustained philosophical treatments that Wittgenstein wrote and which bookend his entire output. In a similar way that David Foster Wallace’s second novel, Infinite Jest, revises his first, The Broom of the System, the language-philosophy of Wittgenstein’s later Investigations refutes many of the analytic arguments in his Tractatus and makes the bold claim that most of the problems that are difficult or impossible to solve in philosophy are the result of a misunderstanding about the nature of language use dating back to Aristotle, namely that problems in philosophy stem from philosophers’ incorrect understanding of the meanings of key words in their arguments. To resolve these misunderstandings, they need to examine how a word is actually used, rather than relying on an outdated definition. It is the second of these two texts

Wallace was concerned with, specifically what Wittgenstein had to say about the notion of

“private language,” or the notion that certain words can mean things to a speaker privately that they don’t mean publicly. Similar to the way that poststructuralism critiques structuralist notions of meaning, Wittgenstein writes that wrongheaded conclusions about the possibility of a private language that can result from treating human language as a system of formal logic, which the

Tractatus does. By the Investigations, Wittgenstein has given up on the systematization of language, feeling that its nature is too complex to be fully captured.

One section of the Investigations was of particular interest to Wallace, which was

Wittgenstein’s treatment of this possibility of the existence of a “private language.” Wittgenstein explains how such a private language, wherein the meaning of a word (like “pain”) is known fully and in all its dimensions only by the person uttering the word, is impossible because of the inherently social nature of meaning: meaning is something that happens collectively between people using a common language; it is impossible to conceive of meaning in a vacuum. What

bothered Wallace about this argument was a conclusion that necessarily followed: if meaning only happens socially between people using a shared language then that language could never reflect the “true” or objective nature of reality—only the reality shared by those who used the language. On these grounds, the notion that there could exist some desolate individual alone in the depths of a pain no one else could fully know is one that Wittgenstein’s Investigations, though not his Tractatus, rejects.

Though Wittgenstein’s second text reversed many of his first’s disconcerting conclusions, Wallace felt that “Wittgenstein had left us, again, without the possibility of contact with the outside world” (Ryerson 30). Describing the situation elsewhere, Wallace told Larry

McCaffery that Wittgenstein’s final text “eliminated [the individual isolation of] solipsism but not the horror” (45). Ryerson does an excellent job of explaining Wallace’s lingering dread:

“The only difference between this new predicament [in the Investigations] and that of the

Tractatus was that rather than being trapped alone in our private thoughts, we were trapped together, with other people, in the institution of language” (30-31). If the only world we can

“know” is both constituted and constrained by language, then the problem of knowing if another’s words are sincere becomes a central one. Any “truth” would necessarily take the form of “true language,” but, as Wallace explains, the status of this truth would be impossible to determine: “If I were separate from language, if I could somehow detach from it and climb up and look down on it[,] I could study it ‘objectively,’ take it apart, deconstruct it[.] But that’s not how things are. I’m in it. We’re in language. … Wittgenstein’s conclusions seem completely sound to me, always have” (McCaffery 45). In another passage, Wallace sums it up by saying:

“Unfortunately we’re still stuck with the idea that there’s this world of referents out there that we can never really join or know because we’re stuck in here, in language, even if we’re at least all

in here together” (31). According to the logic of the Investigations, “the question of whether any language game accurately represents reality can be asked only within some other language game, which operates according to its own set of nonevaluable conventions” (30). Said another way: even if Wittgenstein had reversed his pronouncements on the private, solipsistic nature of language and reality— that “the limits of my language are the limits of my world”—it was only to revise “my” to “our.” Wallace began to address this linguistic estrangement in his other thesis, a text that would eventually become his first novel, The Broom of the System.

Wallace’s fiction thesis was thematically, a kind of extension of his philosophy thesis.

The intersection of the two projects is primarily one of language’s relation to the world of lived experience: “Wallace’s fictional manuscript and the philosophy thesis were also of a piece: both asked whether language depicted the world or in some deeper way defined it and even altered it”

(Max 45). Ryerson is right when he asserts that “The defeat of solipsism was half of what

Wallace sought to capture in Broom. But while Wittgenstein may have ‘solved’ solipsism for

Wallace, there was a catch[,] which Wallace also wanted to convey” (30). The “catch” is precisely this broader sense of language as a collective prison that separates humanity from reality. Unlike Taylor’s fatalism essays, Wittgenstein’s philosophy was not written in the disciplinary vernacular of modal logic, and its refutation required a different kind of language in order to allay the “horror” Wallace felt after finishing Wittgenstein’s posthumously-published treatise (30).

Lost in Translation: The Broom Of The System’s Failures of Theory

That The Broom of the System is the work of a hyperintelligent grad student is clear. But some of the ways it flattens complexities and contradictions in Wittgenstein’s language- philosophy for comic effect or writerly formal showmanship prevent it from exploring

Wittgenstein’s themes with any real depth. Even Wallace’s summation of the novel in the

previous quote from the Lipsky interview dismisses the one of the few sustained aspects of the text’s engagement with theory that isn’t played entirely for laughs, which is the question of the degree to which our experience is constituted by language. The novel’s principal, Lenore, is convinced rather literally by her grandmother that “All that really exists of my life is what can be said about it” (Broom 119). Realizing that her life is “circumscribed by language, Lenore feels not quite in control of her own existence” (James 4). While yes, Lenore feels her life is

“constituted by language,” the joke Wallace’s is driving at here (she’s a literal character in a literal novel, so of course she’s only constituted only by others’ language), represents Wallace’s usual depth of engagement with the philosophical and theoretical questions he chose to treat in the novel’s narrative.

This next section looks at Wallace’s Amherst fiction thesis in further detail, with an eye toward identifying those thinkers and ideas that were carried over from Wallace’s philosophy thesis, as well as from his readings for his philosophy and critical theory coursework as an undergraduate student. The competing truth claims that Wallace attempts to reconcile in his fiction thesis are primarily those of Wittgenstein and Derrida, specifically, their differing accounts of the relation between meaning and language. Derrida’s emphasis on the function of différance in the production of textual meaning entails a privileging of absence over presence, a privileging of writing over speech: it is in part the author’s absence that allows for a space in which the reader can make meaning from a text. Différance also foregrounds the negative nature by which words come to mean anything—that is, words mean different things because of the ways they differ from each other, not because they refer to concrete, unchanging referents or corresponding objects in reality. The context in which words are used in a text, combined with the differences between readers’ interpretative strategies—to name only a couple of constantly

changing variables that must be taken into account—have an effect on what a text “means.”

Derrida’s central point here is that textual meaning is never fixed, never stable, but always in flux, and that the reader determines a text’s meaning at the cost of the meaning its author may (or may not) have intended. Carried to its conclusion, this model of meaning considers everything as fair game for this kind of textual analysis: literature, art, even the reader herself—meaning is always contingent and ultimately deferred through the movement of différance. Even if the reader could define her own meaning at a particular instant, the only surety is that this meaning is only temporary and not fully under her control.

At odds with this theory of meaning is the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus, a systematized picture-theory of meaning in which the meaning of a word corresponds to concrete objects in reality in a literal sense. In this early writing, Wittgenstein goes so far as to say that abstract thought isn’t possible because to think at all is to think in language, and if thinking requires words, those words derive their meaning from concrete referents in lived reality; to speak of

“abstraction” would be meaningless because all words are stand-ins for actual things. One corollary of this theory of meaning is that because we can only think in language, a second-order sign system, language will always separate us from objective reality; and from this Wittgenstein arrives at the conclusion that all we can really know with absolute certainty is our own thoughts—we are forever separated not only from true knowledge of the objects in the world, but from other people as well.

The narrative of The Broom of the System primarily concerns a character named Lenore

Beadsman, and its premise, as Wallace explained it to his editor, began “with a chance comment from a girlfriend. She had told him that she would rather be a character in a novel than a real person,” which had prompted Wallace to think about what the difference was (44). The novel

was set in the then-future year of 1990, and is primarily a narrative treatment of the sorts of questions he had pursued in his philosophy thesis about determinism and the problem of free will.

Lenore, Broom’s principal, is an Oberlin college student, who worries that she may not be real: “She simply felt [that] she had no real existence, except for what she said and did and perceived and et cetera, and that these were, it seemed…not really under her control” (Broom

67). Lenore’s source for this line of thinking comes from Wittgenstein by way of her great- grandmother (her namesake—also named Lenore Beadsman). The elder Lenore had studied philosophy “under a mad crackpot genius named Wittgenstein, who believed that everything was words. Really. If your car would not start, it was apparently to be understood as a language problem. If you were unable to love, you were lost in language. Being constipated equaled being clogged with linguistic sediment. [A] belief that the world is words” (73-74).

Fictionalizing Derrida’s ideas about the metaphysics of absence, Gramma Lenore has recently disappeared from her nursing home, absconding with several other residents. Gramma

Lenore has left behind clues for her great-granddaughter, which the younger Lenore follows throughout the novel. She is ultimately unsuccessful in locating her namesake; Gramma Lenore in fact never appears, and the main action of the novel (and various other sub-plots) remains unresolved at the narrative’s end.

However, Wallace is too preoccupied with the comedic possibilities he sees in Derrida and Wittgenstein, and the cost of this preoccupation is his fiction’s fidelity to their ideas—the ones that purportedly motivate Broom’s principal, Lenore.7 The function of Gramma Lenore’s disappearance is to make room for the younger Lenore to define herself in her great

7 In a letter written during the summer of 1989, Wallace told his Review of Contemporary Fiction editor, Steven Moore, “I don’t know early Wittgenstein well enough to pretend anything like authority over it.”

grandmother’s absence. This absence ostensibly allows Lenore to define her own meaning, which she eventually does after her brother LaVache spells out Wittgenstein’s thinking for her.

Oversimplifying Derrida’s complex and sometimes contradictory metaphysics of absence makes it easier for Wallace to write slapstick set pieces and pull off running gags, but this insistence on comedy forecloses deeper engagement with and meaning for The Broom of the System’s readers.

Because in a novel that is at such pains to showcase its intelligence by making overt reference to philosophy and critical theory, any reader familiar with those allusive ideas will recognize

Broom’s characters and its theoretical understanding for what they are: caricatures. And if readers realize an author has dumbed down the ideas which purportedly drive a work’s central narrative concerns, that author runs the risk of insulting readers’ intelligence. Not to mention their trust: few things are more off-putting to careful readers than feeling that an author doesn’t trust them to untangle the narrative’s nuanced complexities. The joys of engagement with another mind’s complexity is a large portion of what careful readers come to literary fiction for in the first place. In the two passages that follow, Wallace kneecaps Wittgenstein’s theories in exactly this fashion, and in so doing eschews engaging with the reader for providing the easy laugh.

In the following passage, Stonecipher Beadsman III, the father of Lenore Stonecipher

Beadsman, Jr. (whose name is identical to her great-grandmother, who studied under

Wittgenstein) recalls having the elder Lenore lecture him about philosophy:

Has she done the thing with the broom with you? … What she did with me … was to sit me down in the kitchen and take a straw broom and start furiously sweeping the floor, and she asked me which part of the broom was more elemental, more fundamental, in my opinion, the bristles or the handle. The bristles or the handle. And I hemmed and hawed, and she swept more and more violently, and I got nervous, and finally when I said I supposed the bristles, because you could after a fashion sweep without the handle, by just holding on to the bristles, but couldn’t sweep with just the handle, she tackled me, and knocked me out of my chair, and

yelled into my ear something like, “Aha, that’s because you want to sweep with the broom, isn’t it? It’s because of what you want the broom for, isn’t it?” Et cetera. And that if what we wanted a broom for was to break windows, then the handle was clearly the fundamental essence of the broom, and she illustrated with the kitchen window … but that if we wanted the broom to sweep with, see for example the broken glass … the bristles were the thing’s essence.… Meaning as fundamentalness. Fundamentalness as use. Meaning as use. Meaning as use. (149- 500)

While this breathless, one-sided dialogue is admittedly funny in a slapstick sense, and consistent at first glance with the idea that “meaning is use,” the novelty of its rapid-fire style grows exhausting after repeated deployment.

The use of theory in The Broom of the System also fails at least in part because of its inability to keep its metaphors consistent. In order for a metaphor to work—to enrich meaning through the inventiveness of its comparison—the objects of its comparison must be sufficiently real to us as readers. Metaphor succeeds by an imaginative overlapping or palimpsesting whereby we are made aware of something incisive we had not been aware of before. It enhances or sharpens detail; it makes the familiar not just new again, but different. We are apprised of new information. Things are made more real.

Broom’s metaphors fail because we haven’t been given reason to care about its characters. We don’t see ourselves in them, and we cannot make that imaginative leap from our own heads to theirs. The theory which is supposed to enrich our understanding of these characters and the relationships between them has—because of Wallace’s reductionist tendency to eschew exploring theoretical complexity for superficial, slapstick engagement—been deprived of sufficient force.

Beyond these breakdowns for readers, Broom’s theorizing sometimes doesn’t even hold water for the novel’s characters. This is especially the case when one character expects another to find a metaphor to be a revelatory experience: At one point during a therapy transcript, Dr. Jay

literally puts on a gas mask during their session and offers one to his patient, Lenore, as well, anticipating that they’ll both be overwhelmed by the literal “smell of breakthrough” when her figurative? literal? “membrane” is punctured by his figurative insights. Lenore declines the offer, and it’s no surprise—there’s no literal smell because the metaphor doesn’t work: neither the character nor the reader can even keep straight what’s supposed to be literal and what’s not.

But Wallace was adamant that the scenes with Dr. Jay and his theories not be cut more than absolutely necessary. He wrote to Broom’s editor, Gerry Howard, that the discussions of the

“membrane theory” had serious theoretical antecedents:

While potentially disgusting [they are] deeply important to what I perceive as a big subplot of the book, which is essentially a dialogue between Hegel and Wittgenstein on one hand and Heidegger and a contemporary French thinker-duo named Paul DeMan and Jacques Derrida on the other, said debate having its root in an essential self-other distinction that is perceived by both camps as less ontological/metaphysical than essentially (for Hegel and Witt) historical and cultural or (for Heidegger and DeMan and Derrida) linguistic, literary, aesthetic, and fundamentally super or metacultural. (Max 69)

But I would argue that the combination of Wallace’s certainty that “serious” literature needed to be seen making overt gestures to its awareness of literary theory, his insecurity concerning his incomplete mastery of these ideas, and his habit of writing to be liked all have their place in Wallace’s gestalt rationalization for taking the easy way out. Wallace will also successfully revise the therapist as a trope in Infinite Jest, a revision I discuss in the “professional conversationalist” section of Chapter 3. Even if we’re supposed to read Dr. Jay as a stooge of

Gramma Lenore and therefore understand his use of theory as ironic, if the characters are unmoved by the force of these failed metaphors, we as readers cannot be faulted for our empathic deficit toward them.

This lopsided inconsistency happens over and over with slight variations.8 So, for example, When Norman Bombardini informs Rick Vigorous and Lenore that in order to fill the void of the Other he feels after his wife leaves him because he can’t control his weight, he explains his plan to fill that emotional void by proposing to expand his physical self to an infinite size by consuming (literally eating) everything he can get his hands on, he expects he will simply compensate any “lack” he feels over an absent Other by filling it—spatially? emotionally?—with his infinitely-expanded, actual, corporeal body.

When the literalizing of a metaphor works, as it does in Kafka or Barthelme, it’s because the literal instantiation of a metaphor’s figurative language has some kind of emotional resonance. The fact of Gregor Samsa’s metamorphosis is an unsettling enough thought exercise, but it is Kafka’s realization of the emotional consequences of this transplantation of Gregor’s human consciousness into a non-human form that ratchets up our discomfort to the level of the uncanny.

The novel’s governing theoretical tropes—the structures of self/other, sign/signified, reference/referent, absence/presence—don’t work because (at best) they’re hamfisted caricatures of themselves played for laughs. Other times, they’re detached from the objects they’re meant to give meaning to. Sometimes they’re expected to operate simultaneously on both the literal and figurative level, as in Norman Bombardini’s plan to literally consume food until he stops feeling a figurative lack of an absent other, or when Dr. Jay tells Rick Vigorous that he’s anxious because he can’t physically penetrate Lenore’s (metaphorical? figurative?) membrane due to his

8 And no matter how metaphor is understood—the old-fashioned, Aristotelian “similarity” version, I. A. Richards’s “interaction-model,” the “pragmatic schemas” proffered by Davidson in the 1970s, or more recent “cognitive” theories: as narrative or rhetorical devices, they simply break down at levels that they shouldn’t. Worse yet: most of the time, they don’t even make for good jokes, given the excruciating explanations about what concept is standing in for whom in the various and lengthy transcript sessions that appear throughout the novel.

physical genital inadequacy—Rick’s solution to this, since he can’t penetrate Lenore, is to invert this desire and instead endeavor to have Lenore inside him. And Rick, understandably confused, replies: “Shall I simply eat her? That’s what Norman Bombardini apparently proposes to do.

Shall I consume her? Then the Other will certainly become Self” (348). (Those hand-waving allegory-caps are in the original.) Dr. Jay’s response to this absurd question in the novel is “Dr.

Jay Pauses” (348). And no wonder. How could he answer? Having confused the metaphorical dimension for the literal in his analysis of Rick, Dr. Jay finds himself confronted with the consequences of his own error. He is forced to adopt an appropriately Wittgensteinian approach:

“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent” (Tractatus 108).

But perhaps the best example of Wallace either dumbing down Wittgenstein’s theoretical complexity for laughs (or worse—fundamentally misunderstanding the theory’s complexity himself) occurs in a conversation that Lenore has with her brother LaVache in his room at a fictionalized Amherst, where he is a student:

“You told Dad you didn’t have a phone, Dad told me.”

“I don’t have a phone. This isn’t a phone, this is a lymph node,” LaVache said, gesturing at a phone next to the television. “I call this a lymph node, not a phone. So when Dad asks me do I have a phone, I can in all good conscience say no. I do, however, have a lymph node.”

“You’re horrible,” said Lenore. (Broom 215)

The crux of the theoretical error in this scene is one that Wallace also commits in the previous, long excerpt of “meaning as use” dialogue above, in which Lenore’s father talks about the broom. The problem with both of these examples—of Gramma Lenore’s meaning of “broom” in her use of it and in LaVache’s meaning of “lymph node” by his use of it—is that they both completely ignore what Wittgenstein was ultimately getting at when he said that a word’s meaning was determined by its use. “Use,” in Wittgenstein’s mature, final revision in the

Philosophical Investigations, means social use. It is a use that is decided by consensus, by the community of speakers who rely on that word’s collectively-decided—and decidedly fixed— meaning to refer to the same object or concept. To purposely refer to his phone using a name other than “phone,” which is the word that has been decided by consensus that the object will be properly called, is to miss the point of the social nature of meaning’s construction. LaVache’s antinomian use of “Lymph Node”—a term that his father doesn’t understand—amounts to the kind of wrongheaded thinking that Wittgenstein describes when he critiques the notion of

“private meaning” as an impossibility.

The Broom of the System notoriously ends mid-sentence, leaving the major plot arcs unresolved—formal and narrative choices that both Wallace’s editor, Gerry Howard, and his agent, Bonnie Nadell, had advised him against: “Nadell had raised the issue even before she sold the book to Viking Penguin. The story, she felt, just seemed to stop. She suggested Wallace think about a more traditional last scene. Wallace had dug in—The Crying of Lot 49 famously ends in mid-scene” (Max 69).

Howard also thought the narrative needed some sort of resolution. He urged Wallace to keep in mind “the physics of reading,” a phrase that Wallace came to understand as “a whole set of readers’ values and tolerances and capacities and patience-levels to take into account when the gritty business of writing stuff for others to read is undertaken” (Max 68). In other words, a reader who got through a long novel like Broom deserved to know what had happened. “You cheat yourself as well of the opportunity to write a brilliantly theatrical close to the book,” (70)

Howard wrote to Wallace.

Even so, Wallace informed his editor that he would not revise Broom’s ending in a decidedly sorry-not-sorry justification:

“I admit to a potentially irritating penchant for anti-climax, one that may come out of Pynchon, but a dictum of his that I buy all the way is that, if a book in which the reader is supposed to be put, in some sort of metaphysical-literary way, in something like the predicament of the character, ends without a satisfactory resolution for the character, then it’s not only unfair but deeply inappropriate to expect the book itself to give the reader the sort of satisfaction-at-end the character is denied—the clear example is Lot 49.” … What he meant was he knew reality to be fragmented, oblique, unbalanced, and his book had to capture that fragmentation if that experience was to count for anything—that was why he wrote the way he did. In the end, he insisted on keeping the ending he had written, breaking the novel off in midsentence, with Rick Vigorous, Lenore’s ex-boyfriend, [saying] “I’m a man of my”—the missing word being, elegantly and self-referentially, the word “word.” (Max 69-71)

The question of how one ought to “end” a novel informed by postmodernism and therefore revealed itself constantly as a mediated text was one that Wallace would revisit and revise successfully via an incredibly inventive sort of recursion, as I argue in Chapter 3.

Wallace would eventually come to see the “click” as a distraction from his work—and not as its goal: “I used to think the click came from, ‘Holy shit, have I ever just done something good.’ Now it seems more like the real click’s more like, ‘Here’s something good, and on one side I don’t much matter, and on the other side the individual reader maybe doesn’t much matter, but the thing’s good because there’s extractable value here for both me and the reader. Maybe it’s as simple as trying to make the writing more generous and less ego-driven” (51). Instead,

Wallace’s approach has shifted dramatically: “I’ve found the really tricky discipline to writing is trying to play without getting overcome by insecurity or vanity or ego[.] You’ve got to discipline yourself to talk out of the part of you that loves the thing, loves what you’re working on. Maybe that just plain loves” (50). This discipline is one that Wallace had to consciously practice:

I’m not saying I’m able to work consistently out of the premise, but it seems like the big distinction between good art and so-so art lies somewhere in the art’s heart’s purpose, the agenda of the consciousness behind the text. It’s got something to do with love. With having the discipline to talk out of the part of yourself that can love instead of the part that just wants to be loved. I know this doesn’t sound hip at all. I don’t know. But it seems like one of the things really great fiction writers do … is give the reader something. (50)

That Broom can’t manage this gift is largely because a novel written to impress—written to be liked—is, at bottom, a book whose relationship to the reader is not one of giving but rather of needing.

It is finally the way—the protean narrative forms—that Broom uses to translate philosophical problems into fictional ones that leaves its impression on the reader, which is not unlike the one left by heavy-cocaine-usage era Robin Williams: he’s working with good material, but what the routine lacks in sustained engagement of a single topic isn’t quite made up for by the frenetic pace with which he blows through his various impressions. The novel fails to address the philosophical questions themselves in detail, never mind what the human consequences of those problems might entail. Caryn James similarly sums up the novel’s strengths and weaknesses in her review:

The heart of the novel, though, is its verbal extravagance and formal variations, reflecting Lenore's belief that language creates and imprisons her[.] What's the difference, Mr. Wallace seems to ask, between the real Lenore and the … version in [these] stories? And, by extension, what's the difference between the real-life reader and Lenore in The Broom of the System? Wallace aims to create his own language game, a fictional system in which ''something's meaning is nothing more or less than its function.'' The philosophical underpinnings of his novel are too weak to support this, though. There is too much flat-footed satire of Self and Other, too much reliance on Philosophy 101. (8)

One is left feeling that the author of The Broom of the System wasn’t so much writing to an imagined audience but rather performing in front of a mirror. At the end of the day, Broom’s diegetic world distills Wittgenstein’s philosophy into a comically absurd joke with a glib punchline: “the truth is that there’s no difference between a life and a story” (Broom 120). When

Wittgenstein’s theory appears in The Broom of the System, it becomes quickly obvious that the chief conclusion from the Investigations Wallace found productive was Wittgenstein’s notion that in a socially-constructed language (which all languages necessarily are), a word’s meaning is determined by its use.

But it is also Wallace thumbing his nose at the idea that we don’t ultimately decide who we are; because Rick Vigorous is a character in a novel, he is literally defined by Wallace’s words. But in omitting the final word, “word,” from the novel’s last sentence, Wallace withholds his words’ final foreclosure of Rick Vigorous’s self-determination. By choosing not to have the last word, Wallace sides with Derrida and the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus: meaning is made possible through absence, and our inner selves are finally something that we alone decide—not others—because all we can really know with certainty are our own thoughts.

Immediately after the 1996 release of Infinite Jest, in a little-cited interview published on the last two pages of issue #2 of the San Francisco-based Speak Magazine, Wallace again told an interviewer why he was unsatisfied with the formal gimmickry of his previous approach:

If you don’t make fun of me, I’ll tell you what I was trying to do. I was very interested in technical semantics, which is the relationship between form and context. That paragraph at the end [of Broom] is missing the word ‘word,’ so I thought I would bridge both the formal and the reference. Instead, I missed on both counts…Now, ten years later, I understand that people read for intellectual reasons and emotions. And that the ending [of Broom] I wrote is almost off-putting, like giving the finger to the reader. I’m interested in a marriage of the two. (“1458 Words” 40)

Wallace’s ongoing preoccupation with the problems he’d encountered in philosophy, his unsuccessful attempt at their fictional treatment in The Broom of the System, and his well- documented competitive streak—Max’s biography’s index lists ten separate entries under

“Wallace, David Foster: competitiveness of” (354)—all factor into the motivational gestalt that fueled the last novel Wallace would see published.

Later in his career, in a 1998 essay, a more mature David Foster Wallace than the one who wrote The Broom of the System wrote that he had figured out that “not all paradoxes have to be paralyzing” (“Nature of the Fun” 198). But at the beginning of his writing career, it is

precisely the fear of certain paradoxes—linguistic, philosophical, fatalistic—that paralyze his writing for readers.

He was especially susceptible to challenges that imposed limits on language’s ability to make meaning, especially when those challenges came in the form of paradoxical language.

Upon encountering these types of arguments, whether in the form of paradoxical conclusions in the modal logic of Taylor’s “Fatalism,” Wittgenstein’s notion of a complex and unsystematizable language of socially constructed meaning that paradoxically kept its users from speaking any real truth about their world, or Derrida’s conclusions about the ways that the usual thinking about language and meaning contained their own paradoxical undoing, Wallace felt a level of unease that motivated him to challenge those arguments in his own writing.

What seems to be at the heart of all the arguments by writers who obsessed Wallace early on is the issue of choice, or, rather, those authors’ conclusions about the limits of choice. It seems especially important to Wallace that the human ability to make choices—especially existential choices—remain open. It is not unlike a familiar claim of addicts: “I can quit whenever I want,” a claim which relies on a future choice that must remain open in order to justify the behavior of their current choice. It was at least important enough that Wallace, when presented with an argument whose conclusions made unreasonable or unwarranted restrictions on this choice, would learn to speak fluently in whatever form of technical vernacular it took

(modal logic, language philosophy, poststructuralist critical theory) in order to refute it on its own terms.

And it was this protean ability to adapt his thinking to languages of specialization that he would harness to connect with readers in Infinite Jest. But in the period following the success of

The Broom of the System, Wallace’s addictions would begin to impinge on the choices available

to him in his own lived experience. And in an attempt to engage with certain agents of a medicalized recovery culture in order to refute their conclusions, he would once again immerse himself in a new technical vocabulary—one that permeates all 1,100 pages of his last novel.

Chasing the “Click”: DFW’s Other Drug of Choice

In a 1993 interview with Larry McCaffery, then a comparative literature professor at San

Diego State University, Wallace says:

For most of my college career I was a hard-core syntax wienie, a philosophy major with a specialization in math and logic.… Wienieish or not, I was actually chasing a special sort of buzz, a special moment that comes sometimes. One teacher called these moments “mathematic experiences.” What I didn’t know then was that a mathematical experience was aesthetic in nature, an epiphany in Joyce’s original sense. These moments appeared in proof-completions, or maybe algorithms. Or like a gorgeously simple solution to a problem you suddenly see after filling half a notebook with gnarly attempted solutions. It was really an experience of what I think Yeats called “the click of a well-made box.” Something like that. The word I always think of it as is “click.”… It was real lucky that just when I stopped being able to get the click from math logic I started to be able to get it from fiction. (McCaffery 32-33)

Wallace makes it sound here as if he abandoned philosophy for fiction, but it seems more accurate to describe his change in academic focus as one of methodology rather than content. To borrow a math metaphor, the essential problems and paradoxes that intrigued Wallace in philosophy were transposed into the domain of fiction writing. But neither discipline was finally the point as such. They were interchangeable; what mattered was the “buzz,” the need for the continued experience of the “click.”

Wallace sought to narrativize the consequences of life in a world governed by

Wittgenstein’s philosophical-linguistic axioms in the fashion that Sartre’s play No Exit dramatizes the tenets of existentialism. And in his English Department seminars, Wallace found another literary thinker who was similarly preoccupied with these problems of language and meaning.

The historical prevalence of theory in the American academy has obvious implications for Wallace’s work. By the time Wallace began to seriously consider fiction writing at Amherst, poststructuralism was an established and dominant critical mode. (It remained much the same when I started graduate school twenty years later.) In his later interviews, Wallace was always careful to note the conclusions of poststructuralist theory he found useful, especially its exposure of the ways fiction writers had avoided talking openly about fundamental parts of the relationship between writers and readers, an omission he made much of in his own work. But in all of Wallace’s published characterizations of poststructuralism, he generally tends to focus on the negative aspects that obtained in an academic environment where poststructuralist theory was de rigueur. As Wallace told Larry McCaffery: “the demise of Structuralism has changed the world’s outlook on language, art, and literary discourse; and the contemporary artist can simply no longer afford to regard the work of critics or theorists or philosophers—no matter how stratospheric—as divorced from his own concerns” (McCaffery 13). In a different interview, he addresses the influence of poststructuralist theory on American fiction:

What’s interesting to me about the ‘60s and ‘70s generation was that they changed the ball game. The avant-garde debunked the myths but didn’t have the foresight to follow it up with anything. So we grew up in the rubble. Something has to build something else. That helps explain why serious art is important. Somewhere in all of us is a hunger for narrative, to see what we’re up to and about. We have to substitute the hedonism and spiritual naïveté that left us with nothing with something. Except we don’t know what it is. (“1458 Words”)

When Wallace says that the theory-inflected fiction of the ‘60s and ‘70s left later writers standing in the “rubble,” this rubble is what’s left of the traditional ideas that had been dynamited: long-held, comfortable (and comforting) notions of how language worked—that we could use it to make sense of the world—or that it was at least stable enough to use as a tool for making sense of our lives and experience. But starting from the rubble is like being faced with the task of constructing meaning, only all the tools have been taken away.

In the waning years of the twentieth century, as American culture began to subsume poststructuralist theory’s conclusions, communicated as they were understood by writers who had graduated from theory-heavy university programs, some of the disturbing conclusions of poststructuralist theory took on an almost axiomatic status, something like an episteme of scrutiny and suspicion, a cultural current of irony. And this is the moment in which Wallace finds himself writing.

On April 5, 2011, after a visit to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, which had acquired Wallace’s archive, Maria Bustillos published a piece on the marginalia in some of Wallace’s books that the HRC made available to researchers. Titled “Inside David

Foster Wallace’s Private Self-Help Library,” Bustillos’s findings proved revealing enough that

Wallace’s estate had over twenty books, including the ones cited in her piece, pulled from the archive. Later, on August 30th, Bustillos posted an update that read:

It appears that all the books referenced in that piece have since been removed from the Ransom Center’s collection of Wallace’s papers. The collection, which used to contain 320-odd books, now contains 299.

It never occurred to me that Wallace’s estate would be in a position to rescind part of the sale of his documents to the Ransom Center; I wrote what I did under the assumption that these books would remain available to anyone who was interested in seeing them. I was very sorry—or rather, entirely freaked out—to learn that that will no longer be the case.

D. T. Max’s estate-sanctioned biography, which contains many of the same conclusions as

Bustillos’s piece about the Wallace family’s dysfunctional relationships, had not yet been published. At the time, some thought that what had incensed the Wallace Literary Trust was

Bustillos’s outing of an anonymous “testimonial” by the former resident of a halfway house in

Boston—called Granada House—as having been penned by Wallace. It contains more than a few unadorned and straightforward admissions, such as “The diagnosis of my family, friends, and teachers was that I was bright and talented but had ‘emotional problems.’ I alone knew how

deeply these problems were connected to alcohol and drugs, which I’d been using heavily since age fifteen” (Bustillos 25). Along with this attribution of the testimonial to David Foster

Wallace, the article also made clear that Wallace had been in AA and NA, organizations that insist on anonymity (an anonymity that Wallace had always publically maintained).

As its title suggests, Bustillos’s article also featured a large number of transcriptions of

Wallace’s marginalia she found in his self-help books, marginalia concerning his mother, Sally

Wallace—who is a member of the Wallace Literary Trust, and who retains a degree of say over what the Ransom Center makes available for public research. Bustillos’s article is not an unkind one; quite the contrary. She writes at one point: “Wallace loathed himself in error. He had a real value that others could see, but he could not. And another bad thing: he identified so closely with his mom, it’s as if she got caught in the crosshairs of his self-loathing.” Bustillos’s essay is if nothing else kinder to both Wallace and his mother than Wallace’s own marginalia.

Of particular interest to my current claims are the places that Bustillos discovered marginalia that confirm some of my earlier speculations in Chapter 2, particularly those about

Wallace’s deep psychological need to perform academically to please his parents. Among these annotations in Alice Miller’s The Drama of the Gifted Child are: “Amherst 80-85,” which appears in the margin of this paragraph: “Such a person is usually able to ward off threatening depression with increased displays of brilliance, thereby deceiving both himself and those around him,” Another annotated paragraph’s text reads:

But how can you love something you do not know, something that has never been loved? So it is that many a gifted person lives without any true notion of his or her true self. Such people are enamored of an idealized, conforming, false self. They will shun their hidden and lost true self, unless depression makes them aware of its loss or psychosis confronts them harshly with that true self.

And next to it, another handwritten note from Wallace: “Becoming what narcissistically- deprived Mom wants you to be – performer. It is worse if the parent is smart—she knows what it

looks like to be a good, healthy parent.” Other marginalia concerns Wallace’s judgement on his family in those places that Max’s bio must skim over for lack of information: “Shame begets shame to compulsive/addictive behavior,” “DFW comes home broken in ’82-not a ‘perfect family.’ Mom’s lie here breaks down,” and “DFW the ‘troubled one in family-angry, anxious, depressed-acting out, instantiating family’s sickness (Why I see myself as ‘fucked up’?)” One could understand why Sally Wallace, not to mention James Wallace or David’s sister Amy, wanting to have these books removed from the public’s access.

In the end, Bustillos reasons that perhaps therapy—a place where one sits alone with a doctor who is primarily supposed to listen to your inner thoughts—wasn’t the best thing for

Wallace. Given that he spent so much time locked in his head, it is questionable just how much good was achieved by Wallace’s ruminations, both in therapy and in the margins of his self-help books, since, as Max’s bio and many other sources will attest, Wallace had always spent much of his time preoccupied with these dark thoughts.

In addition to Wallace’s marginalia in the now-removed books at the HRC, there is another archival object that testifies to his psychological pressure to perform and the deleterious effects that this had on his conception of self. In October of 2008, Amherst held a memorial service for David Foster Wallace, a recording of which was later made publicly available on their website. After hearing from Wallace’s friends from his time at Amherst, his colleagues from

Pomona College, his students, and his Amherst teachers and the director of his English thesis, those in attendance persuade Mark Costello to say a few words in closing, which he resists, saying he hadn’t planned to say anything. But he relents, and he tells those assembled:

Coming east was a big deal for him, and he made it a bigger deal in his head, because he needed hurdles. He needed to create these fictional hurdles, which is something depressed people do. It’s something very smart people do. It may be one part of the way in which death eventually cornered him and killed him. … It’s

important to come away with a sense of how painful his day-to-day life was, and how a powerful and compelling depression [was] linked to his personality.… He said ‘I hear this chatter in my head and I can’t get it to shut up and it’s…it hates me, this chatter, and it just chatters things about me: “you’re a fraud, you’re selfish, you don’t treat people right … fraud, fraud, fraud, fraud. (Costello)

In these remarks from his Amherst roommate about Wallace’s invented “hurdles,” one hears echoes of the marginalia from the self-help books (“Such a person is usually able to ward off threatening depression with increased displays of brilliance”), and in the accusations of

Wallace’s “chatter” is a version of the self-help claim that “many a gifted person lives without any true notion of his or her true self.”

But Costello also said that Wallace’s mind could, at times, pull itself out of the chatter’s noise: “the way to get it to shut up was to create a focal point outside yourself which would be this other voice which was the musical voice of the prose.” If Wallace felt truly as the records of

David Lipsky, D. T. Max, Mario Bustillos, and Mark Costello attest—that his “self” really was, at bottom, a performance—then Broom’s theoretical failings take on an intensely tragic character. Without a sense of an authentic self—whether one understands it to be a construction or not—if one feels only absence where others feel they exist, deep down as conscious beings, how can we reasonably expect such a person to deeply engage with theories of self vs. other or presence vs. absence? In that nightmarish scenario, understanding there to be only absence where one’s presence should be, there is no self to speak of.

CHAPTER 3 WALLACE’S ETHICAL TURN: WITTGENSTEIN’S MISTRESS AS HITTING BOTTOM

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.

—William James The Letters of William James

The Inter-Novel Period: From Tucson to Normal

In Chapter 3, I resume the biographical examination from Chapter 2 and extend it to cover David Foster Wallace’s inter-novel period, which begins in 1985 as he enters Arizona’s

MFA program and runs to 1993 when Wallace accepts a position in the English department at

Illinois State University. Corresponding with the second phase of my three-part recovery schema, this inter-novel phase is the crucial midpoint in both Wallace’s theory- and substance recovery narratives. The central event in this liminal stage, bottoming out, represents a necessary crisis. It is a literally epiphanic1 event, a low point that finally reveals addiction’s raw cost with sufficient force to make recovery more attractive than continuing to use.2 As twelve-step literature attests, most addicts are unable to fully commit to recovery without first hitting bottom.3 It satisfies the only requirement for joining twelve-step programs, which is a sincere and honest desire to quit (Alcoholics Anonymous iv, 562). Between September 1988 and

1 This “epiphany” (334) is referred to variously in the text of Alcoholics Anonymous as a “spiritual awakening” (60), a “thunderbolt” (56), and a “revelation” (56).

2 “One definition of a bottom is the point when the last thing you lost or the next thing you are about to lose is more important to you than booze. That point is different for everyone, and some of us die before we get there” (Alcoholics Anonymous 425).

3 “Unless this person can experience an entire psychic change, there is very little hope of his recovery” (Alcoholics Anonymous xxix).

September 1991, Wallace’s substance-abuse problems landed him in two different psychiatric units, a supervised detox facility, a halfway house, and a sober house for recovering addicts.

But this three-year span was also the period when Wallace came to recognize value in the discipline and order required by twelve-step programs like Alcoholics Anonymous. In the daily routines imposed by supervised recovery, he learned to practice the habits of mindfulness that informed the rest of his writing. But how exactly did Wallace go from being the author who wrote The Broom of the System, an experimental, theory-heavy novel that nearly sinks under the weight of its own ironic prose and digressive pedantry, to the writer who in less than three years’ time publicly disavowed that novel, going so far as to publish critical essays cataloguing its failures?

Weaning himself off theory was a process that played out publicly during this inter-novel period. In Chapter 3’s final two sections, I read a selection of Wallace’s literary-critical appraisals of other writers as texts that telegraph future shifts in his own fiction’s use of theory.

Kicking his theory habit did not come easily. Wallace’s dependence on others’ ideas was deeply ingrained, and at first, he tried to have things both ways by turning theory on itself in an attempt to short-circuit metafiction’s inherent feedback loop of self-consciousness. The culmination of these half-measures was the spectacularly involuted (and seldom-read) novella “Westward the

Course of Empire Takes its Way,” a piece that Wallace would eventually regard as an unfortunate but necessary exercise.

As with his entry into substance-abuse recovery, kicking the theory habit required a similarly epiphanic literary event—which for David Foster Wallace came in the form of David

Markson’s novel Wittgenstein’s Mistress. Reading Markson’s novel marked the beginning of

Wallace’s sincere and honest desire to connect with readers rather than impress them, and this

new goal is apparent in all his fiction that followed. This ethical shift—away from theory-driven narratives and toward fiction that attempted to communicate with readers—was one that Wallace would not have committed to without getting sober. As sobriety improved his mental health and personal relationships, Wallace began applying the lessons of twelve-step recovery to his writing, a change that ultimately helped him formulate a mature writing- and work ethic that made possible the landmark novel that established his place in the tradition of American letters,

Infinite Jest.

Wallace in Tucson

After his Amherst graduation in the spring of 1985, David Foster Wallace again moved back to his parents’ house in Illinois. Early that summer, Wallace drove from Urbana to Amherst to pick up his friend and former roommate Corey Washington. But two days after they returned to Illinois, David Foster Wallace had to be admitted to the psychiatric unit of Carle Hospital for severe depression, and Washington found himself on a bus back to Amherst. Wallace was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, a constellation of symptoms then called “manic depression.”

But for reasons that remain unclear, Wallace’s doctor prescribed Nardil, an “MAO inhibitor often used to treat atypical depression,” which is characterized by “unusual sensitivity to social rejection and a quick return to mental health when circumstances improve” (Max 52). Either way, Wallace’s mental condition improved drastically, so much so that Wallace was “out of the hospital and on a kind of high” before the end of the summer (52).

That August, Wallace arrived in Tucson to begin his MFA studies at the University of

Arizona. Despite the coursework required by three graduate seminars and a writing workshop during his first semester, it only took him about a month to prepare a draft of his undergraduate fiction thesis for submission to prospective publishers (65). Wallace sent the manuscript out to more than fifteen prospective agents; only one replied. That agent, Bonnie Nadell, was the first

and only literary agent of Wallace’s career. In December, Nadell shopped the manuscript around to editors, one of whom was Viking Penguin’s Gerry Howard, who offered a $20,000 advance for the book. One semester into his graduate studies, Wallace had his first editor.

That Wallace’s writing professors at Arizona were proponents of Realism and were uniformly uninterested in producing writers of experimental fiction came as a surprise to him. In the acceptance letter from Mary Carter, the MFA program’s director, Wallace had been told he would be encouraged to find his own voice; that “instead of the ‘guru’ system (which tends to foster a ‘school’ of writing, and a tendency of the student to write for or like one master), we encourage diversity” (50). The reality of the program was quite different. The Arizona faculty

“were not fans of postmodernism, which they associated with a different era and condition and a preciousness that stories in the true American grain should not possess” (60). But because of

Wallace’s acceptance to other MFA programs (all more prestigious than Arizona but which didn’t offer financial aid) along with his success in securing an agent to promote his first novel of experimental fiction, Wallace felt confident enough to defy the edicts of his new professors when he thought they were holding him back—a defiance that sometimes bordered on the combative.

As he began his MFA work, Wallace’s writing still relied on foregrounding other thinkers’ ideas. D. T. Max provides an illustrative anecdote:

[W]hen another participant [in his literary theory seminar] called Derrida a waste of time, Wallace got so mad that everyone thought there would be a fight. He was still convinced that theory was what separated the serious novelist from the others, that without it writers were just entertainers. His interest in theory, like his fondness for stories with strong voices, also had a compensatory element. It served to satisfy energies that would have been frustrated had they gone into aspects of fiction writing he did not naturally excel at, like character development. (Max 74)

Compared to his writing teachers, Wallace found the MFA students at his new institution to be a generally supportive—if slightly incestuous—group. Wallace was much more confident around

them than the students at Amherst, and at times, his attitude was flatly arrogant. Social skills had never been his forte, and Wallace’s theoretical posturing rubbed some of his fellow students the wrong way. Looking back at his behavior at Arizona, Wallace would later tell Lorin Stein, “I was a prick” (par. 13). No doubt contributing to Wallace’s new social confidence was his increasingly heavy drinking and drug use. In Arizona, Wallace found this sort of experimentation as beneficial for his social life as the formal experiments were for the pieces he was writing; almost all of the stories in Wallace’s first collection of short fiction, Girl with Curious Hair, were originally written for his MFA portfolio.

In the spring of 1986, Wallace and a group of friends in the MFA program went to see

David Lynch’s Blue Velvet. Unexpectedly, it was an experience that caused him to rethink both his approach to experimental fiction and his responsibility as a writer. As he later recalled the experience:

It was my first hint that being a surrealist, or being a weird writer, didn’t exempt you from certain responsibilities. But in fact it obligated, it upped them. That whatever the project of surrealism is works way better if 99.9 percent of it is absolutely real.…It’s that one thing in a Lynch frame that’s off, that, if everything else weren’t picture-perfect and totally structured, wouldn’t hit. (Lipsky 170)

Before Blue Velvet, Wallace had not thought serious writers needed to concern themselves with anticipating readers’ emotional responses or expectations. But as he started to ask himself what made Lynch’s film leave such an impact on him, he came to realize that “the very most important artistic communications took place at a level that not only wasn’t intellectual but wasn’t even fully conscious.” The genius of Blue Velvet’s juxtaposition of thematic content and stylistic choices, Wallace felt, lay in its emotional—rather than cerebral—effects on the viewer, in “the way the movie’s surrealism and dream-logic felt: they felt true, real” (“Supposedly” 201,

200). Upon further reflection, Wallace saw that the way the film achieved that emotional impact—what made the “one thing in a Lynch frame that’s off” have such an effect on the

viewer—was that except for the “one thing,” the rest of the film’s aesthetic operated in an unironic, non-self-conscious, “capital-R Realist” mode. It was a turning point in Wallace’s thought regarding the relationship between artist and audience. This relationship, Wallace realized, was one that was modulated by the use of theory. And what was so upsetting about the surreal moments was that they upset the moral and ethical expectations that the rest of the film’s realist aesthetic set up. This realization—that “being a weird writer didn’t exempt you from certain responsibilities…[that] in fact it obligated, it upped them” marks an important change in

Wallace’s approach. It signals Wallace’s turn toward a writing ethic grounded in the realization that experimentation and theory can affect the moral and ethical dimensions of a narrative—and that by extension, purely ironic or theoretical fiction tends to produce ethically vacuous or at least amoral narratives. And it offered at least a hint of how to move past the postmodern trap of metafiction’s awareness of its status as text. Still convinced that serious fiction necessitated the use of theory in some capacity, Wallace began to look for a way to salvage what was productive about metafiction without constantly calling attention to the narrative’s experimental status. The more he could downplay metafiction’s self-consciousness, the easier he might be able to access the powerful emotional register in his readers that he felt while watching Lynch’s film.

The work Wallace submitted in his Arizona workshops can be understood as trying to advance the work of those authors who had first made him want to write fiction—experimental writers like Barthelme, Pynchon, and Barth, who Wallace considered his literary fathers. Wallace saw his generation of writers as the inheritors of the advances made by postmodern fiction, but this inheritance came with a responsibility to push that fictional tradition forward with their own fiction. Wallace’s attempts to move past postmodernism are apparent in his fiction during his time at Arizona. There is in these workshopped pieces a perceptible shift away from the kind of

writing he’d done in Broom. He was “beginning to play around with the props of narrative, rearranging them to see what might catch his attention [by] going through the various tools in the postmodern tool kit, [and] trying each one out” (Max 62). His fascination with how the underlying mechanisms of language and fiction worked remained undiminished. In addition to his fiction workshops, Wallace signed up for graduate courses on literary theory, such as

“Methods of Critical Reading and Writing,” a graduate seminar that focused on Derrida’s Of

Grammatology (56). Though Wallace was happy enough with the workshop pieces he was steadily producing, he knew he’d made no real progress in his project to advance beyond what postmodern fiction had accomplished, so he continued to look for a way to push his fiction forward. Thematically, Wallace remained obsessed with the ideas he’d been so taken with in his undergraduate philosophy courses—primarily the problem of solipsism and theories of meaning that he first began writing about in his fiction at Amherst. Indeed, these fundamental issues of language, meaning, and the conception of the self would be the subject of Wallace’s writing in one form or another until the very end.

The process of publishing The Broom of the System didn’t take long: the editing process with Wallace’s new editor was completed in six months, and the book was slated for publication before Wallace was scheduled to graduate from Arizona. When the novel debuted, it was generally well reviewed, though most reviewers generally found it to be too clever for its own good. But it gained enough attention that Alliance Entertainment optioned the movie rights for

$10,000. Wallace capitalized on the book’s success by convincing Howard to offer him a

$25,000 advance on his next project, a collection of short fiction pieces from the portfolio he was assembling for his MFA requirements. Taking full advantage of Arizona’s printing facilities,

Wallace began mailing out some of his MFA-workshopped writing4 for publication—a requirement, his editor Gerry Howard told him, for their appearance in any future collection of short stories.

Wallace took what he had learned from Blue Velvet to heart—after seeing the film,

Wallace began focusing his mental energies on finding more nuanced ways to integrate theory with his fiction and “to treat seriously issues that had mostly been played for laughs in Broom”

(75). To varying degrees, the stories Wallace wrote at Arizona for the collection he was planning represent incremental advancements in Wallace’s fiction, both in terms of traditional narrative fundamentals like character development and voice, but also in their use of theory. They are examples of Wallace’s early attempts to put into practice what he’d learned from his Lynchian epiphany, and as a result, their fictional worlds feel more like readers’ lived experience, and demonstrate another lesson he took away from watching Blue Velvet: that “first-rate experimentalism was a way not to ‘transcend’ or ‘rebel against’ the truth but actually honor it”

(201). Contrary to The Broom of the System, the fictional experiments he was now writing attempted to honor the truth by obscuring rather than foregrounding their theoretical engagements. Whereas Wallace’s first novel makes mention of Wittgenstein by name and devotes numerous long passages to the rehearsal of his ideas, the characters in Girl, even when they are less-than-fully realized, never function solely as mouthpieces for others’ ideas. It turned out that the clichéd edict of the creative-writing workshop—“show, don’t tell”—turned out to be solid advice.

Thematically, Wallace’s Arizona stories remain preoccupied with the themes from

Wallace’s first novel: solipsism, loneliness, irony, substance abuse, and dichotomies of

4 These pieces appeared in Paris Review, Arrival, Fiction, Conjunctions, Playboy, Florida Review, Puerto de Sol, and Harper’s.

interiority/exteriority self/other are all still present. Where Wallace achieves noticeable progress is in the sublimation of his theoretical formal and stylistic impulses to his new goal of making his stories feel true for his readers. In the end, these short fictional pieces succeed or fail according to their ability to escape the recursive metafictional techniques they employ. Very few manage to break completely out of their self-reflexive loops. The majority of the stories that make up his first collection of short fiction, Girl with Curious Hair, fall into one of two categories: minimalist meta-takedowns of nihilistic minimalism such as “Everything Is Green” and “Little

Expressionless Animals” or parodies of overused metafictional setups that achieve their critique by creative rearrangement of those same tropes.

However, the stories’ recurrent thematic engagement with solipsism—especially those that traffic in the vernacular of deadening U.S. pop-culture—often leaves the reader with a lingering sense of isolation rather than community. It might be that because two-thirds of the stories are parodies or outright hit-jobs of specific authors (e.g. “Girl with Curious Hair” takes dead aim at Bret Easton Ellis in order to expose him as a writer of lazy, vapid, even harmful fiction). The nature of these stories is necessarily critical and ironic, but sometimes so much so that they run the risk of recreating the problem they intend to critique. While pitch-perfect mimicries, their purpose as imitations is to expose the failures of the texts they parody. As a consequence, these stories’ ability to connect with readers is necessarily attenuated by their status as critical takedowns. That most of these stories leave readers feeling lonely or cold also owes something to the fact that Wallace was still honing his craft. These pieces are, after all, attempts to push past the postmodern American aesthetic without a clear idea of what such a fiction might look like.

But this does not mean that none of the stories succeed. Stylistically, the majority of the stories are told in the postmodern vernacular of 1980s U.S. pop culture, but they differ from the empty nihilism of then-popular minimalist writers like Ellis in that characters’ identifications with and affinities for a particular corporate brand are not meant to stand in as symbolic representations of their empty inner-selves. Instead, Wallace uses the shared language of pop- culture and brand advertising to “honor the truth” of readers’ day-to-day existence—to make the stories feel more real.5 The remaining three pieces of short fiction (“Lyndon,” “Luckily the

Account Representative Knew CPR,” and “My Appearance”) succeed more than the preceding six precisely because they aren’t intended as takedowns or parodic exercises of style or form.

The voices in these pieces are stronger, more like Wallace’s distinctive mature voice, the one that he would eventually grow to fear had become a trope or a parody of itself. And as Wallace’s own voice gets stronger, it tends to tell a similar kind of story, one closer to a morality tale or a parable. Unburdened by the negative payload that weighs down stories like “Girl with Curious

Hair,” Wallace’s writing in these last three pieces manages to direct readers’ attention outside the text itself and escape the form’s trap of self-awareness and hints at what Wallace will do on a much greater scale in Infinite Jest.

Wallace had originally planned to return to Tucson for at least part of the fall of 1987, finish up whatever writing and formal program requirements remained, and then graduate in

December—one semester longer than the MFA students usually took to complete the program.

But as the end of the spring term neared, Wallace’s anxiety over how he would earn a living after

5 As when, for example, Wallace locates the action of “Little Expressionless Animals”—a story that takes place on the set of the TV show JEOPARDY!—in the “Merv Griffin Enterprises building” (6), or when the character “Sick Puppy” in “Girl with Curious Hair” informs us: “I have the English Leather Cologne commercial taped on my new Toshiba VCR and I enjoy reclining in my horsehair recliner and masturbating while the commercial plays repeatedly on my VCR” (55).

Arizona, the MFA program’s hostility toward his writing goals, and his failure to make any progress toward them made finishing his MFA in Tucson seem like more of a hindrance than a duty. Eager to get out of Arizona and on to what might come next, Wallace put himself under additional pressure as he accelerated his pace in order to finish his MFA by the summer, eventually deciding to leave Tucson in late spring to move back home to Illinois; Wallace could mail in any writing still needed to meet his MFA degree-requirements. He had been accepted to

Yaddo, a prestigious writers’ colony in Saratoga Springs, New York, that offers residencies to promising authors, for a stay that began in Late July, but beyond that, he had no concrete plans.

When Wallace had first arrived at Arizona as a new MFA student, he brought with him the relatively moderate habit of smoking pot to help him study he’d developed at Amherst. But as his time at Arizona wore on, he began to worry about the effects of the increasing levels of alcohol and drugs he took in an effort to manage his stress and anxiety. In his letters to his old

Amherst friend Corey Washington, Wallace wrote that he “sat around smoking pot in air conditioning” and “getting high too much” (Max 79, 77). When his fellowship ran out at the beginning of his second year of the MFA program, Wallace had to get up early to teach undergraduate courses in addition to his own coursework. He wrote Washington again, saying that he had started drinking so that he could fall asleep early enough to teach in the mornings

(80). Though initially encouraged by the publication of his first novel, Wallace now worried about the prospect of having to find a source of reliable income after graduate school. As his time at Arizona came to a close, wrung out and exhausted by his accelerated schedule, and with no job prospects, Wallace was experiencing an emotional low that verged on another bout of full-scale depression. Wallace coped by turning to what had worked before, upping his self- medicated dosages.

Overloads and Collapses: Wallace Hits Bottom

After Arizona, Wallace spent the next two years on the move, living in New York,

Massachusetts, Illinois, and Arizona, but his first stop after leaving Tucson to finish his MFA work from his parents’ house was in Saratoga Springs, New York, for his stay at Yaddo during the summer of 1987. Over the course of his residency, Wallace ratcheted up his drinking to compensate for (what must have been) a surprising lack of pot at the writers’ colony. But despite debilitating hangovers, he was working constantly and making progress on the new project he’d begun after leaving Tucson that he intended as the closing piece for his upcoming short fiction collection. That summer, Wallace completed “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way,” recasting Barth’s story “Lost in the Funhouse” as a long piece of cerebral metafiction that was

“as much an attack on the work Wallace had done at Arizona with its mix of postmodern styles as it is on Barth” (Max 94).

This novella-length story was conceived as a patricidal6 literary project that would follow the experimental literary-theoretical trajectory that he began with Broom to metafiction’s logical and unavoidable conclusion. Fed up with the lack of progress despite all his experiments with metafictional forms at Arizona, Wallace now intended to conclude Girl with Curious Hair with a story in which he would overload the inward-bending, self-conscious form to the point of collapse. But like planning a debauched weekend in Vegas before checking into detox—one last bender-to-end-all-benders—hindsight revealed the plan as inherently flawed:

My idea in “Westward” was to do with metafiction what Moore’s poetry or like DeLillo’s Libra had done with other mediated myths. I wanted to get the Armageddon-explosion, the goal metafiction’s always been about, I wanted to get it over with, and then out of the rubble reaffirm the idea of art being a living transaction between humans, whether the transaction was erotic or altruistic or sadistic. God, even talking about it makes me want to puke. The pretension.

6 Wallace lists the patriarchs he had in mind by name in “Westward”: alongside Barth are the usual metafictional suspects “Robbe-Grillet and McElroy and Barthelme” (332).

Twenty-five-year-olds should be locked away and denied ink and paper. Everything I wanted to do came out in the story, but it came out as just what it was: crude and naïve and pretentious. (Burn 41)

Wallace knew by “Westward” that he had to find a way to write without letting theory drive his fiction. And if “Westward” taught Wallace anything, it was that the way to write past postmodernism could not be achieved by employing still more theory. Once again, Wallace found himself at an impasse. As with his substance abuse, Wallace had relied on theory so heavily for so long that he didn’t know how to write without it.

That Wallace was still dependent on theory to the point of publicly defending it is evident in another piece he published around this time. On June 21st, 1987, The New York Times published an essay by the literary critic Jacques Barzun that caught Wallace’s eye. Titled “A

Little Matter of Sense,” Barzun’s prescriptive scolding opens with examples of his colleagues’ recent lexical crimes, offers a refresher on the proper use of metaphor, and spends its remaining column-inches decrying “certain widespread social attitudes” before finally running out of breath just north of 3,000 words. And along the way, Barzun isn’t shy about naming names: those responsible belong to the “cult of creativity” a group of “obscure and pompous” critics (but specifically “structuralists,” “semioticists,” and “deconstructionists”), who mistake themselves for artists and whose work mistakes “complication for improvement.”

Among the responses elicited by Barzun’s essay, one reply—printed August 2, 1987, and entitled “Matters of Sense and Opacity”—is signed “David Foster Wallace.” The rejoinder

Wallace sent to the Times takes issue with more than a few of Barzun’s points. Specifically, regarding the charge of confusing critical for artistic writing, Wallace responds with hair- splitting lecture:

Literary criticism is itself an artistic endeavor, and will naturally sometimes sacrifice transparency for creative richness; literary theory, on the other hand, is a branch of esthetics, which is essentially philosophy, and is often engaged in honest

efforts at such rarefied heights that things are going to get unavoidably abstract and technical; literary criticism and theory, by their natures, operate in dialogue with art, with each other, and with themselves; such a tangle of reference and referents cannot but lead to some occlusion and prolixity. It’s the price of admission.

In other words, Wallace’s advice to Barzun is that if he can’t keep up with the level of complexity an analysis of theoretically-informed literature requires, then perhaps he should get out of the literary-critical kitchen.

Against the charges of hiding behind overspecialized jargon or trafficking in obscurantist metaphors, the tone of Wallace’s response is well rehearsed and even tempered. This is partly because Wallace is reprising the same arguments he’d had with his professors and fellow MFA students at Arizona: that contemporary writers who evaded or ignored critical theory’s insights about the nature of fiction were not writing serious literature. And this type of fiction necessitated that critics engage with it on its own “overspecialized” terms. Theoretically-aware writers, among whose number Wallace certainly counted himself, aimed not to “erect walls of impenetrability around the very stuff they’re trying to penetrate”; rather, he continues, “Some might just be trying to come to grips with what they love.” But Wallace can’t seem to resist getting in at least one jab in closing: “With all his rhetorical power, Mr. Barzun might do well to write another essay, one for us young readers and readees, one about the value of cool-headed restraint in critical housecleaning. There’s babies in that bathwater, dude.” Wallace, ever self- conscious, is especially so in this moment. Given The Broom of the System’s publication that year, which was still the work Wallace was known for (when he was known at all), Wallace felt compelled to defend—or perhaps explain—the prevalence of theory in his first novel. But in

Wallace’s response there is a tempering of the anger he had felt in his classroom arguments over theory at Arizona. Having finished the last piece for Girl with Curious Hair, Wallace is less anxious about his ability to wield theory.

His summer fellowship over, Wallace left Yaddo to take a teaching position at Amherst in the fall of 1987. But the heavy drinking he learned to work with during his productive time at

Yaddo followed him to Amherst. Wallace knew it didn’t augur well. Though he would not take on an AA sponsor until the summer of 1988—Rich C., who had been in the Arizona MFA program with him—by September, Wallace knew that he had a “drinking problem,” and he acknowledged as much in a letter to his friend J. T. Jackson, another former Arizona MFA student (101). When Mark Costello came to visit him at their alma mater, Wallace confided in his old roommate that he was suffering from another bout of depression and “worried that pot smoking had ruined his brain permanently and [that] he would never be able to write [fiction] again” (103). “Not being able to write” was Wallace’s way of saying that he had not figured out how to follow up “Westward”; he had reached a formalistic dead end. But the teaching appointment only lasted a single semester, and after it was over, Wallace would have to pull up stakes. Before he left Amherst again, Wallace received a request from Steven Moore, then-editor of the Review of Contemporary Fiction, to “contribute a piece to their ‘Novelist as Critic’ issue,” in which Wallace was meant to “represent the younger generation” (109). He accepted. Grateful to have been chosen by Moore as his generation’s “novelist,” Wallace had always held that the long form of the novel was the true test of a writers ability. Additionally, he thought composing the essay might give him a place and an occasion to organize his thinking on what kind of fiction ought to succeed the postmodernists he’d parodied in Girl with Curious Hair and the metafictional forms he’d followed to their paralytic and unsatisfying conclusions in “Westward.”

Wallace responded to Moore’s request with a long essay titled “Fictional Futures and the

Conspicuously Young.” In it, Wallace grouped and condemned current fiction by contemporaneous young writers into one of three (rather convenient) categories; either

“Catatonic Realism” or “Neiman-Marcus Nihilism,” under which Wallace filed young minimalists like Bret Ellis or Jay McInerney (who then enjoyed a large popular readership) or the kind of writing that he had rebelled against at Arizona, which he categorized as “Workshop

Hermeticism”—none of which Wallace thought was what young serious writers ought to be producing.

Wallace had meant for “Fictional Futures,” published in the fall of 1988, to serve as a sort of gloss for his upcoming collection of stories, Girl with Curious Hair, which was also slated for release that fall (Max 106). Wallace begins by giving his account of what these “conspicuously young” writers (including Wallace) have in common, which is “the new and singular environment in and about which we try to write fiction” (3). This common, singular environment is a tripartite affair, comprised of the “impacts of television, of academic Creative Writing

Programs, and of a revolution in the way educated people understand the function and possibility of literary narrative” (3). In Wallace’s lengthy explication, the first two—television and MFA programs—are something to be lamented; the first indoctrinates passivity and uncritical habits by serving up a steady diet of the narrative equivalent of junk food without seeming to ask for anything of value in return. It is a ubiquitous cultural environment, and the collective hours

Americans spend watching it testify to its addictive nature. Worse yet, this focus-group-tested addictive quality is by design—because television does in fact want something from us. And we sit, receptive, through its demands thirty seconds at a time because we have been conditioned to do so by the very advertising agencies who collude with television producers to produce entertainment that feeds our addictive instinct for consumption. Wallace finally understands the reality that American television sells viewers as one completely coopted by addictive forces.

Along with the cultural debasement of television, Wallace names “Creative Writing Programs”

as complicit. If MFA programs mainly produce writers of Realist fiction (of the type Wallace rebelled against at Arizona), the mimesis of American culture this Realist fiction achieves cannot but reify television’s harmful, late-capitalist version of reality.

But it is the last item, this “revolution in the way educated people understand the function and possibility of literary narrative,” that Wallace devotes the most attention to, as he sets it up as a possible antidote for the cultural decline that the first two, television and graduate fiction programs, are responsible for. It is this “revolution” that was to serve as the aforementioned gloss of Girl with Curious Hair’s more theory-heavy stories:

[O]ur generation is lucky enough to have been born into an artistic climate as stormy and exciting as anything since Pound and Co. turned the world-before-last on its head. The last few generations of American writers have breathed the relatively stable air of New Criticism and an Anglo-American aesthetics untainted by Continental winds. The climate for the “next” generation of American writers— should we decide to inhale rather than die—is aswirl with what seems like long- overdue appreciation for the weird achievements of such aliens as Husserl, Heidegger, Bakhtin, Lacan, Barthes, Poulet, Gadamer, de Man. The demise of Structuralism has changed a world’s outlook on language, art, and literary discourse; and the contemporary artist can simply no longer afford to regard the work of critics or theorists or philosophers—no matter how stratospheric—as divorced from his own concerns.

Crudely put, the idea that literary language is any kind of neutral medium…or that it’s any kind of inert tool lying there passively to be well- or ill-used by a communicator of meaning, has been cast into rich and serious question. With it, too, the stubborn Romanticist view of fiction as essentially a mirror, distinguished from the real world it reflects only by its portability and mercilessly “objective” clarity, has finally taken it on the chin. Form-content distinctions are now flat planets. Language’s promotion from mirror to eye…is yesterday’s news [and now] the tide of Post-Structuralism, Marxism, Feminism, Freudianism, Deconstruction, Semiotics, Hermeneutics, and attendant -isms and -ics moves through the (“Straight”) U.S. academy and into the consciousness of the conscious American adult. (13)

In his reference to “Pound and Co.,” whose generation “turned the world-before-last on its head,” Wallace is attempting his version of Pound’s modernist “make it new” edict. Wallace’s demands of his contemporaries are essentially the same: stop ignoring the progress of recent

years by rehashing outmoded literary models and narrative forms. As “Pound & Co.” wrote in the 20-page manifesto that begins the 1914 issue of BLAST magazine: “DAMN all those today…who crack their whips and tumble in Piccadilly Circus, as though London were still a provincial town. WE WHISPER IN YOUR EAR A GREAT SECRET. LONDON IS NOT A

PROVINCIAL TOWN” (10). Wallace suggests here that writers who can integrate the lessons of critical theory will not only push fiction forward, but write fiction which is immune to the type of co-option he accuses “Catatonic Realism,” “Neiman-Marcus Nihilism, and “Workshop

Hermeticism” of being susceptible to. Wallace still hadn’t shaken his theory habit sufficiently to understand that recourse to theoretical fiction wasn’t the answer to the darker, addictive parts of

American culture. And at least part of the reason he couldn’t see that was because he was still addicted to using theory as a crutch for his own fictional shortcomings. Wallace may have satisfied himself that he’d written to the end of metafiction’s possibilities with “Westward,” but he still hadn’t figured out how to write without the theory he still considered the distinguishing characteristic of serious fiction. But he knew that merely holding up a mirror to the problems of empty materialist tendencies in culture would not itself be sufficient.

His Amherst appointment over, Wallace moved back into his parents’ house in January of

1988. By February, he began attending “weekly sobriety meetings” (Max 116). Trying to get sober in order to improve his writing had by this point become a recurring theme in Wallace’s life. He would cycle through periods of heavy drinking or drug use when he struggled to produce work, followed by productive periods of relative sobriety, eventually relapsing back into heavy using. Max purposefully avoids naming the program Wallace attended, but I am convinced these weekly appointments represent Wallace’s first encounters with twelve-step culture, and that

these sobriety meetings were with a Narcotics Anonymous group7. But Wallace was deeply embarrassed at once again having to depend on “the Mr. and Mrs. Wallace Fund for Aimless

Children,” (Girl) for room and board, and quickly accepted another appointment, this time teaching undergraduate courses that fall at the University of Arizona. Though the teaching job didn’t start until August, Wallace decided to move back in May.

A month before he moved back to Tucson, Wallace received more bad news that would ultimately delay the publication of his short fiction collection for an entire year beyond its original launch date. Ironically, what stalled Girl with Curious Hair was a problem that arose when the story that represents the collection’s most pointed criticism of television appeared on

TV. While watching reruns of Letterman, an editor at Playboy—where Wallace’s story “Late

Night”8 had been accepted for publication—noticed some of the interview dialogue between

Letterman and his guest, Susan Saint James, seemed strangely familiar. Eventually, he tracked down the source of his déjà vu: the dialogue between the character "Susan” and the fictionalized version of David Letterman in Wallace’s story. The story takes place in part on the set of Late

Night with David Letterman, and Wallace had lifted some of their “fictional” conversation word- for-word from an actual episode. Alice Turner, who had bought the story for Playboy, sent

Wallace a letter accusing him of plagiarism. Because it was too late to pull Wallace’s story before the issue came out, Playboy’s legal department decided to simply hope no one noticed.

No one did—but that didn’t stop the magazine from informing Viking Penguin that publishing

7 My reasoning for this is twofold: Max makes it clear in this section of the biography that, for Wallace, the goal of these weekly meetings was to quit smoking pot: “He had smoked pot heavily for most of the past decade. Pot had opened the door for him as a writer. Now he was targeting it in the hopes his life, haunted by anxiety, failed relationships, and a feeling that he could no longer write well, would improve” (106). But Max’s biography also confirmed a longstanding rumor—that Wallace was the author of a testimonial by a “former resident” on the website of a Boston-area halfway facility known as “Granada House”; and that testimonial reveals that its author had been in Narcotics Anonymous.

8 The story appeared in Girl with Curious Hair under the title “My Appearance.”

Wallace’s story represented a legal liability. Viking Penguin’s lawyers instructed Wallace’s editor, Gerry Howard, to ascertain the source of every one of the collection’s characters, paragraph by paragraph. In the end, the eighteen-page explanatory letter from Wallace to his editor wasn’t sufficient to allay the publisher’s fear, and Viking Penguin’s legal department scuttled the collection over fears that it would open them up to charges of violating the “right to publicity” of Susan Saint James, David Letterman, Alex Trebek, and Pat Sajak—all of whom appear in Girl with Curious Hair.

When he got to Tucson, he reconnected with his friend Rich C., who in the intervening years had joined the twelve-step recovery program of Alcoholics Anonymous and was eager to talk to Wallace about the benefits of sobriety. Already convinced that his drinking or drug use

(or both) was keeping his fiction from progressing, Wallace took Rich C. on as his sponsor and started attending regular AA meetings in Tucson, where he began working the steps in earnest.

But Tucson AA was particularly hardline9, and around August, in the name of being substance- free, Wallace decided to stop taking the Nardil he had been prescribed since 1985. The semester started just after Wallace went off his medication, and only a few weeks into the school year,

Wallace had to call his mother to come get him. Back in Urbana, the psychiatrist who had

9 The use of pharmaceuticals, even when prescribed by a licensed physician, remains a controversial one in AA Due to the independent nature of individual AA chapters, the advice a new member receives varies by location. AA officially addresses this problem in a pamphlet titled “The AA Member—Medications and Other Drugs”: “We recognize that alcoholics are not immune to other diseases. Some of us have had to cope with depressions that can be suicidal; schizophrenia that sometimes requires hospitalization; bipolar disorder, and other mental and biological illnesses.… Because of the difficulties that many alcoholics have with drugs, some members have taken the position that no one in AA should take any medication. While this position has undoubtedly prevented relapses for some, it has meant disaster for others…. AA members and many of their physicians have described situations in which depressed patients have been told by AAs to throw away the pills, only to have depression return with all its difficulties, sometimes resulting in suicide.… Unfortunately, by following a layperson’s advice, the sufferers find that their conditions can return with all their previous intensity. On top of that, they feel guilty because they are convinced that ‘AA is against pills’…. It becomes clear that just as it is wrong to enable or support any alcoholic to become re-addicted to any drug, it’s equally wrong to deprive any alcoholic of medication, which can alleviate or control other disabling physical and/or emotional problems” (6). Readers are then offered member testimonials of two varieties: AAs who maintain sobriety with the help of pharmaceuticals and those who got off their medications but are purportedly maintaining sobriety without pharmaceutical aid.

100

originally prescribed Nardil put him back on it, but the drug now failed to pull Wallace out of his depression. Demoralized, Wallace overdosed on the Restoril he’d been given to help him sleep and, at the hospital he was taken to after his father discovered him, he was put on life support.

Though he recovered quickly from the overdose, his depression had not improved. In the weeks that followed, Wallace underwent six courses of electroconvulsive therapy in an effort to shake his depression. The ECT affected his short-term memory, but improved his mood to the degree that his doctors felt the Nardil prescription alone would be sufficient to keep his depression at bay. Wallace was also encouraged in November when he received word that his editor, Gerry Howard, was now working for W. W. Norton and that Norton’s legal department felt they could publish Girl with Curious Hair with only minor alterations. Wallace signed off on the transfer of the collection from Viking to Norton, and in December, approved a short list of changes that Norton’s lawyers required before they would greenlight Girl with Curious Hair for publication.

As Wallace’s health returned, so did the guilt over being dependent on his parents, who he felt he owed for the medical expenses they had covered when his insurance ran out during his treatment. Wallace turned to a familiar solution: he applied to graduate school again, this time to the philosophy PhD programs at Harvard, Princeton, and the University of Pittsburgh. Though all three sent back acceptance letters and aid packages, Wallace chose Harvard for its prestige— which would no doubt please his father—and for Harvard’s proximity to Mark Costello. By

April of 1989, Wallace had moved into an apartment with his old roommate in Somerville,

Massachusetts.

Over the summer that followed, Wallace started several projects: the only one he completed was a book on hip hop that he and Costello co-authored and eventually published as

101

Signifying Rappers. But without his roommate to keep his own projects on schedule, Wallace had trouble finishing the other nonfiction pieces and book reviews he had taken on as a way to supplement his income. One of these reviews, eventually published a year later in the summer

1990 issue of The Review of Contemporary Fiction, was of David Markson’s novel

Wittgenstein’s Mistress—a book that had a profound impact on Wallace. But though he took the novel and a copy of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus along with him for his stay at Yaddo in July,

Wallace wasn’t able to finish it. Some of the difficulty finishing the work at Yaddo that summer was due to Wallace’s increasingly excessive drinking and drug use. Wallace brought pot with him, and when it ran out, Kathe Burkhart—an artist Wallace met at the retreat—flew to New

York to get more. During this trip to Yaddo, Wallace went to visit his father’s family in nearby

Troy, where he drank “most of a bottle of Glenlivet and threw up in his sleep.” (127). His appetites didn’t abate when he got home, and Wallace and Costello’s apartment in the weeks leading up to the fall semester at Harvard was a bacchanal of partying, injuries, unpaid bills, and three-A.M. phone calls (128). Wallace had reached peak substance abuse by the time his first semester at Harvard commenced, and the review for Wittgenstein’s Mistress, along with several other projects he’d taken on that summer, remained unfinished. Wallace’s level of substance abuse had finally grown to a level that his natural ability was unable to overcome. Though he didn’t yet recognize it, this was a disastrous state of affairs for Wallace’s mental health. In addition to his continued frustration over the lack of progress in his fiction and the uncertainty that he would ever discover a way forward, Wallace’s longstanding coping mechanisms were not only no longer helping him get his writing done but rather making it impossible to write meaningfully at all.

102

Between the brutal course load Wallace signed up for, struggling to finish the freelance projects he had started that summer, and the full-bore spiraling of his drug and alcohol habits,

Wallace broke down again toward the end of October, having lasted a little over a month in his new graduate program. He developed the shakes, and the depression he recognized from the previous year was back. Once again in crisis, he hit on a creative solution: to avoid getting kicked out of school, Wallace informed Harvard’s Health Services that he was having suicidal ideations, which left the school no choice but to put him on suicide watch at MacLean hospital, a facility affiliated with the school.

By the end of October 1989, David Foster Wallace found out what hitting bottom looked like for him: “a pink room, with no furniture and a drain in the center of the floor. Which is where they put me for an entire day when they thought I was going to kill myself. Where you don’t have anything on, and somebody’s observing you through a slot in the wall” (Lipsky 296).

But this bottoming out, for Wallace, may have saved his life. Max elaborates: “The four weeks

Wallace spent at McLean in November 1989 changed his life. This was not his first or most serious crisis, but he felt now as if he had hit a new bottom or a different kind of bottom” (Max

135). After suicide watch at MacLean, Wallace was placed in a facility called Appleton House— a communal, supervised facility “where the addicts went, with a large room for substance abuse recovery meetings” (135). The staff did not mince words and forced Wallace to countenance the uncomfortable truth that “he was a hard-core alcohol and drug user and that if he didn’t stop abusing both he would be dead by thirty” (135). The experience was finally sufficient to shake

Wallace up enough to get serious about his sobriety, and in typical overachiever fashion, he not only went to the daily meetings that residents were required to attend, he also asked for several private sessions with a therapist over the month he lived at Appleton.

103

After his four weeks of detox were up, Wallace could have opted to leave institutional recovery system altogether. But newly, sober, Wallace decided he wasn’t ready and transferred himself to the Granada House facility—a halfway house he would later fictionalize in Infinite

Jest. Throughout Wallace’s life, “Order, no matter how foreign the context, was always easier for him that the unstructured world” (139), and it appears that as Wallace tried to pull out of the spiral, his need for order was greater now than ever. The seven months that he spent at Granada house, Wallace went to daily recovery meetings. Despite prioritizing his sobriety over everything else in his life, it was not a wholly unproductive time in terms of writing. In one month, Wallace managed to finish the review of Markson’s novel in time for publication in the summer 1990 issue of The Review of Contemporary Fiction. His project with Costello, Signifying Rappers, was published a few months later in November. After Granada house, Wallace moved into the “sober house”—the final stage of the recovery program. Wallace stayed in this transitional house from

June of 1990 until September of 1991. During this time10 he gave what would become his most widely-cited interview with Larry McCaffery for The Review of Contemporary Fiction. The topics Wallace and McCaffery covered in that lengthy conversation ranged from what made for good fiction, to the role of theory, to Wallace’s own writing goals (“any novel that isn’t of the theory/philosophy-inflected type doesn’t set up the sort of expectation serious 1990s fiction ought to be setting up in readers” (138). When McCaffery asks Wallace about the function of theory in realist fiction, the evolution in Wallace’s thought on the subject since his first novel is evident. While Wallace was still insistent that serious contemporary fiction had to concern itself with theory, he now felt that theory’s use had to be somehow constrained. The single most important criterion for the use of theory in fictional narratives, Wallace told McCaffery, was that

10 April 1991 (Max 155)

104

it not be deployed simply for its own sake—or rather, for the sake of impressing the reader alone.

The other condition Wallace gave for theoretically-aware fiction is that without it, the narrative style necessarily reverts to “big-R Realism,” which after the theoretical turn, is a regressive and dishonest move, and one that—more importantly—reifies the type of value system proffered by television and driven by advertising concerns: that above all, difficulty is to be avoided because it will drive ad revenues down when the audience becomes uncomfortable. Or in Wallace’s words: “I'm not much interested in trying for classical, big-R Realism, not because there hasn't been great U.S. Realist Fiction that'll be read and enjoyed forever, but because the big R' s form has now been absorbed and suborned by commercial entertainment. The classical Realist form is soothing, familiar and anesthetic; it drops us right into spectation” (McCaffery 138).

That Wallace’s positions on such fundamental issues remained virtually unchanged for the rest of his life is a testament to how solid he already was in his sobriety. But even his time at the sober house ended, Wallace was still anxious about enforcing the structure required to stay sober outside the recovery system. The apartment he moved into after the sober house was one he shared with another recovering addict, and recovery staff had a hand in setting the pair up in their new space.

Wallace knew he owed his return to writing—in fact owed his continued existence—to the experience of hitting bottom and his continued involvement with twelve-step recovery programs. It was hitting bottom that forced him to accept that his intellect had not been sufficient to save him. Humbled and receptive in a way he had never been, it was in recovery that Wallace read and recognized in David Markson’s novel Wittgenstein’s Mistress what he had failed to do in his first novel, The Broom of the System.

105

Thinking Out Loud: Wallace’s Inter-Novel Criticism as a Progression Toward His Mature Fictional Ethic

In the early stages of his 12-step recovery, the vulnerable Wallace found the prospect of writing fiction too daunting to even attempt. His mind was in a fog, and he was being forced to reconsider every choice he had made that led to his current state of affairs. But as time passed,

Wallace decided to try writing literary criticism to see if it wouldn’t lead him eventually back to fiction. During this nascent period of sobriety, Wallace’s appraisal of his contemporaries’ fiction

—what he likes and doesn’t in terms of style, voice, and theoretical methods—can be read as a record of how Wallace arrived at his mature writing ethic and its sublimation of theory to emotional concerns and a desire for connection with readers. By reading for those things that

Wallace alternately praises or condemns in these literary-critical essays, especially in his review of David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress, it becomes clear that Wallace is assembling two punch lists—things he must do, and things he must not do—in his fiction’s use of theory going forward.

As is well documented, Wallace saw his fiction as clearly situated in the lineage of

American letters. In his interviews and essays, Wallace is no less confident about his status as a literary and cultural critic, composing in 1993 a now-exhaustively-cited, manifesto-grade call for a generation of “new literary rebels” who would “eschew self-consciousness and fatigue,” characteristics he saw as inherited by his generation from their immediate literary forbears (“E

Unibus” 193).

The earliest and longest of Wallace’s inter-novel critical analyses took nearly eight months and several hundred pages of discarded drafts to complete. Its subject was a novel by

David Markson, a postmodern American writer famous for his experimental novels that commonly feature “plots” comprised of a series of dense, nonlinear, and seemingly-unconnected

106

allusions. The title of Markson’s novel, Wittgenstein’s Mistress, would have attracted Wallace with its reference to Ludwig Wittgenstein—the philosopher Wallace had first encountered in his philosophy courses and whose ideas he would reference constantly in The Broom of the System.

Despite (or because of) the difficulties it presented, the process of writing the essay was extremely beneficial for Wallace. During its composition, a “new clarity was beginning to emerge in his attempt to wrest such central concerns as self-consciousness and loneliness into controllable form. The prose style that would later separate Wallace’s nonfiction writing from that of his peers” began to take shape (Max 142).

Wallace begins his review of Wittgenstein’s Mistress, published in the summer 1990 issue of The Review of Contemporary Fiction, by highlighting its status as philosophical novel:

Certain novels not only cry out for critical interpretations but actually try to direct them[.] Frequently, too, those novels that direct their own critical reading concern themselves thematically with what we might consider highbrow or intellectual issues—stuff proper to art, engineering, antique lit., philosophy, etc. These novels carve out for themselves an interstice between flat-out fiction and a sort of weird cerebral roman à clef. (218)

But in the very next sentence, Wallace abruptly shifts gears mid-paragraph, and without naming it, offers up Broom up as a failed example of this kind of philosophical novel:

When they fail, as my own first long thing did, they’re pretty dreadful. But when they succeed, as I claim David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress does, they serve the vital & vanishing function of reminding us of fiction’s limitless possibilities for reach & grasp, for making heads throb heartlike, & for sanctifying the marriages of cerebration & emotion, abstraction & lived life, transcendent truth-seeking & daily schlepping, marriages that in our happy epoch of technical occlusion & entertainment marketing seem increasing consummatable only in the imagination[.] (218)

This passage’s first sentence contains a careful bit of rhetorical sleight-of-hand: despite its self- deprecation, it categorizes The Broom of the System as belonging to the same general philosophical novel category as Wittgenstein’s Mistress. But this sentence, in likening Broom to

Markson’s novel, has an extended function, one that ranges over the body of the essay: if these

107

novels are basically comparable in type, then the characteristics of Markson’s novel—narrative, formal, metafictional, philosophical, etc.—that Wallace praises are (obviously) things that he thinks this sort of novel should do well. And by extension, since his novel of this type is set up as a failed version of Markson’s, those things are (maybe not as obviously) things that Wallace saw

Broom as failing to do. As a writing teacher, Wallace was obsessively mindful of the amount of readerly attention his writing demanded and paid careful attention to his own syntax.11 This is true even more so in his critical writing. So if Wallace has only written one novel, what is the word “first” doing in the sentence “When they fail, as my own first long thing did, they’re pretty dreadful”? That Wallace doesn’t strike it at some point during the revision process seems to signal Wallace’s plans for his second novel.

I dwell on this detail because it has import for the rest of the Markson essay; specifically, if Wallace intends to write another novel of this kind, another “weird cerebral roman à clef” (as one could reasonably expect him to do, given what he said about “serious” novels necessarily being “theory-philosophy-inflected”), anything that Wallace praises or condemns about

Markson’s novel can necessarily serve as a kind of punch list for his next novelistic attempt.

Bearing that in mind, one can assemble a sort of “to-do list” (or “to-don’t”) for Wallace’s own writing from this point forward based on his assessment of Markson’s novel. The first item on this list I’d like to examine is on its next page:

Wittgenstein’s Mistress, w/r/t its eponymous master, does more than just quote Wittgenstein in weird ways, or allude to his work, or attempt to be some sort of dramatization of the intellectual problems that occupied and oppressed him. Markson’s book renders, imaginatively & concretely, the very bleak mathematical world [of] Wittgenstein’s Tractatus…. The novel quickens W’s early work, gives it a face, for the reader, that the philosophy does not & cannot convey…. His

11 Evidence for this claim is readily available by way of his comments on his own students’ papers and the markup of his own draft materials available online and at the Ransom Center.

108

mistress, though, asks the question her master in print does not: What if somebody really had to live in a Tractatusized world? (219)

Here, Wallace has no reason for disparaging Markson’s novel for “quoting Wittgenstein in weird ways,” or simply “allud[ing] to his work” because he goes right on to praise Markson’s novel for the fact that it doesn’t do those things. Wallace’s focus is not on Markson’s prose here but rather on his own. It is Wallace’s book, not Markson’s, that “just quote[s] Wittgenstein in weird ways” in Wallace’s facile tendency in his first novel to simply have his characters digress at length on the philosophers ideas, and turning them into mere ventriloquists for Wittgenstein himself. Later in the essay, this is confirmed by the familiarity of an unlikely phrase; Wallace says that

Markson imbues the abstract world of philosophy with emotional consequences, that the novel is not simply “written ‘in the margins of’ the Tractatus in the way Candide marginalizes The

Monadology” (223). The phrase “written in the margins” directs us to another text that Wallace had published around the time he was working on the Markson essay. That text is Wallace’s collection Girl with Curious Hair, which was published after much legal wrangling, and which collection’s title page includes this phrasing: “Parts of ‘Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its

Way” are written in the margins of John Barth’s ‘Lost in the Funhouse.’” Clearly, this is

Wallace’s self-inflicted penance, his public flagellation over his own failings in Broom and

“Westward.”

In the introduction to Wallace’s recently-published Amherst philosophy thesis, James

Ryerson comments how Wallace saw Wittgenstein’s Mistress with regard to his own work, writing that “Wallace felt that Markson’s novel had succeeded in uniting literature and philosophy in the way that he, in Broom, tried but failed to do” (27). And while Ryerson doesn’t adduce “The Empty Plenum” as evidence for these claims, his argument is certainly supported by Wallace’s essay:

109

I don’t mean to suggest that Markson’s achievement here consists just in making abstract philosophy ‘accessible’ to an extramural reader, or that WM is in itself simple…. Rather, for me, the novel does artistic & emotional justice to the politico- ethical implications of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s abstract mathematical metaphysics, makes what is designed to be a mechanism pulse, breathe, suffer, live, etc…. That is, Markson’s WM succeeds [in] communicating the consequences, for persons, of the practice of theory; the difference, say, between espousing ‘solipsism’ as a metaphysical ‘position’ & waking up one fine morning after a personal loss to find your grief apocalyptic, literally millennial, leaving you the last and only living thing on earth, with only your head, now, for not only company but environment & world, an inclined beach sliding toward a dreadful sea. (217-221)

As Wallace learned from Blue Velvet, the most important resonances that art has with its audience are not intellectual but emotional. But for Wallace, what Markson has succeeded in doing with Wittgenstein’s Mistress is a perfect marriage: it brings out the underlying emotional resonance in the intellectual content of Wittgenstein’s philosophy by creating a fictional world in which characters live according to the systems laid out by his writing—a writing in which there is almost no emotion at all.

Furthermore, any fiction that aims merely at “making abstract philosophy ‘accessible’” just to save the reader some work doesn’t make Wallace’s punch list for his own fiction going forward, which is a sentiment that he reinforces in a later interview when he says that good fiction facilitates communication between the reader’s consciousness and the writer’s, and “that in order for it to be anything like a real full human relationship, she’s going to have to put in her share of the linguistic work” (Burn 34). The importance of routine that recovery had instilled in him had proven to Wallace that there is inherent value in doing the hard work himself. Here,

Wallace is clearly breaking with his motivations for writing Broom—the conspicuously clever displays of intellect and humor Wallace composed out of a need to impress and be liked by his readers.

Conversely, one of the things Wallace repeatedly comes back to in the essay is

Markson’s skillful marriage of form and content. Over the course of the review, Wallace more

110

than once calls attention to Markson’s “formal ingenuity” (220), and one of the more interesting ways Markson’s novel combines form and function is by way of the “messages” that appear in its opening and closing sentences, messages which, though both diegetically “written” by the narrator, operate quite differently: “The start of WM has Kate painting messages on empty roads:

‘Somebody is living in the Louvre,’ etc. The messages are for anyone who might come along to see. ‘Nobody came, of course. Eventually I stopped leaving the messages.’ [Markson’s] novel

[ends] with the use, not the mention, of such a message: ‘Somebody is living on this beach’”

(221). This distinction between “use” and “mention” is one that Wallace carried over from his study of philosophy, and his nod to Frege (the author of the use-mention distinction and who shows up in Infinite Jest) in an earlier footnote (221 fn. 6) calls attention to the distinction as such: “to mention a word or phrase is to speak about it, w/ at least implicit quotation marks: eg

‘Kate’ is a four-letter name; to use a word or phrase is to mention its referent: eg Kate is, by default, the main character of Wittgenstein’s Mistress” (221). By pointing this out, Wallace signals which side of the use/mention distinction he now comes down on—that of use—and in doing, condemns Broom for merely mentioning the theoretical concepts that Markson’s novel puts to formal narrative use. But beyond the pedantic explanation of Frege’s use/mention distinction, Wallace is doing something else: he is crediting Markson with having successfully brought to life not only Frege’s philosophy, but Wittgenstein’s philosophy that he had failed to do in Broom, despite pages of glib dialogue on “meaning vs. use.” It seems worth mentioning that in a meaning-as-use paradigm, the fact that various forms of the word “use” are central to the institutional vocabulary of addiction: drug addicts are called “users,” drug-taking is referred to as “using” or “ab-using.” It collapses a human identity and experience to a single point in which a “user” is a subject who has become interchangeable with the substance she uses.

111

For Wallace, the degree to which Markson had seamlessly married form and function was nothing short of revelatory. It was a consummate specimen of the idea novel Wallace attempted with Broom, and what made its perfection so excruciating was the way it exposes precisely the places where Broom’s attempts to deal with the problem of solipsism fell short. Markson’s achievement was Wallace’s literary equivalent of “hitting bottom.” Wittgenstein’s Mistress achieves something magical; it is like a machine ideally suited to the task it performs; it is the apogee of efficiency, and the effect of this efficiency on the reader is one of connection, of sincere and authentic and emotional resonance and the surety in the reader’s mind that she inhabits the mind of the text’s characters in a real way. This is the precondition for “meaningful” literature—what Wallace calls “good fiction” or “serious art”—for the force of a character’s narrative epiphany to resonate in the reader’s mind, to have it carry over into her actual life and thereby communicate that force in a meaningful way—in other words, to do nothing short of solving the paradox of solipsism or radical skepticism by confirming the existence of both the writer and the reader.

In one particular section of his review, Wallace turns curiously confessional when discussing the novel’s narrator, Kate, and her apparent need to sit typing out the novel, even though she may be the last person left on earth. Wallace writes that he understands this compulsion (one he supposes is shared by all writers who say simply that they “must write”) because it satisfies an “ontological” need: “people who write…do [so] as a as a mode of communication. It’s what critics like Laing call ‘ontological insecurity’—why we sign our stuff, impose it on friends, mail it out in brown manila trying to get it printed.” It’s a strange turn of phrase: “ontological insecurity”—the fear that one somehow does not really exist. That Wallace expresses this fear in the vernacular of his philosophy training links it to another ontological

112

problem: that of solipsism. Ontological insecurity,” conceived this way, is a kind of paranoid solipsism in extremis. It is solipsism compounded by the realization of solipsism’s equally logical counterpart: On the one hand, if no direct knowledge of other minds is possible and all one can know with certainty is her own thoughts, nothing outside one’s own head can be guaranteed to exist. But, on the on the other hand, this logic permits one alternate ontological possibility: if our sensory experience of the world—the objects of which lie outside our own thought—is real, one must entertain the notion that our notion of self—the self that our thought alone makes coherent —is in fact what cannot be known. Feeling ontologically insecure is to entertain as real the possibility of a nonexistent self. Wallace characterizes the acts of writing, submitting his work, and publishing as a defense against this innate fear because they serve as acts of communication with the reader that affirm both writer and reader exist (Max 144).

Writing and publishing in order to confirm one’s own existence is the recovering theory-addict’s version of staying clean.

Wallace writes that at the end of the day, “Actually, what are finally at stake here [in making the consequences of philosophy resonate through fiction] seem to be issues of ethics, of guilt & responsibility…a logically atomistic metaphysics admits exactly nothing of ethics or moral value or questions about what it is to be human” (228). Of Wittgenstein’s two books, only the Tractatus—his first—is a work of “logically atomistic metaphysics.” By endorsing the

Tractatus by way of its ending, The Broom of the System is likewise incapable of admitting

“nothing of ethics or moral value or questions about what it is to be human” (228). Wallace seems to signal his intent here, in condemning Broom, that his next novelistic project won’t make the same mistake.

113

In another critical essay from this inter-novel period that extends the ideas Wallace had developed in the Markson essay, Wallace reviews H. L. Hix’s Morte d’Author: An Autopsy. 12 As with Markson in “The Empty Plenum,” what is praised or condemned in Hix’s work can be read as updates to Wallace’s own punch lists of what he will or won’t do form- and theory-wise in his own writing going forward. As Hix’s title indicates, his book is a sort of postmortem roundup of the disciplinary conversation kicked off by Roland Barthes’s 1967 essay “La mort de l'auteur.”

Wallace opens the review with a four-and-a-half line13 rip-snorter of a sentence that describes how such a conversation got started in the first place: “In the 1960s the poststructuralist metacritics came along and turned literary aesthetics on its head by rejecting assumptions their teachers had held as self-evident and making the whole business of interpreting texts way more complicated by fusing theories of creative discourse with hardcore positions in metaphysics” (2).

Over the two remaining pages, he satisfies the book-review genre’s required criteria, but before turning to a discussion of Hix’s book, Wallace makes a detour, contextualizing Hix’s subject, and framing the extant/extinct author debate as really a fight over where the “meaning” of a text originates—if texts can be said to mean at all. Tracing the concept of authorship back to

Hobbes’s Leviathan, Wallace identifies two requisite characteristics of the author figure: first, authors “accept responsibility for a text, and, second, own that text, viz., retain the right to determine its meaning” (2). Wallace goes on to detail not only Barthes’s arguments against these two characteristics as belonging properly and only to the domain of the author, but also the historical progression of literary-critical schools of thought that led up to Barthes’s well- publicized death notice.

12 Harvard Book Review, No. 19/20 (Winter - Spring, 1991), pp. 2-3

13 (in the original pagination)

114

Wallace characterizes Hix’s critical method as both “sensible and fun to watch” (3).

Sensible because it combines “a Derridean metaphysics that rejects assumptions of unified causal presence” coupled with a “Wittgensteinian analytic method of treating actual habits of discourse as a touchstone for figuring out what certain terms really mean and do” (3). And fun to watch because “one of the wickedly fun things about following literary theory in the 1990s is…watching young critics/philosophers now come along and attack their poststructuralist teachers by criticizing assumptions those teachers have held as self-evident” (2).

Hix’s first order of business, then, is looking at the way the meaning of “author” varies by critic and by context, and here again, Wallace is flagellating himself publically by acknowledging in the work of another author the method he should have used in his first novel instead of only making mention of it.

So with which side does Wallace cast his lot with regard to the deconstructors and poststructuralists? He seems to want to have it both ways throughout the article, both faithfully rehearsing their arguments without feeling the need to rebut them, but also seeming to betray himself in the schadenfreude-dripping references to the “wicked fun” of watching Hix “subvert” or “overturn” poststructuralists using moves straight out of Derrida’s playbook. The title of

Wallace’s review offers careful readers a hint as to Wallace’s real alliances: regarding Barthes’s

“Death of the Author,” Wallace’s essay makes eponymous reference to a Mark Twain quotation,

“reports of my death are greatly exaggerated”—indicating that he’s in on the joke and shares

Twain’s understanding that as authors they are most certainly “alive.” (Though it should be noted that this title didn’t appear in the original organ of publication, the Harvard Review.)

Wallace’s final sentence leaves no doubt about which side of the debate he’s on. But perhaps more importantly, it also signals that Wallace is beginning to consider other thinkers’

115

stances on issues of value matter more than their positions on theoretical concerns: “As William

(anti-death) Gass observes in Habitations of the Word, critics can try to erase or over-define the author into anonymity for all sorts of technical, political, and philosophical reasons, and ‘this

“anonymity” may mean many things, but one thing which it cannot mean is that no one did it’”

(3).

Because Wallace suffered from the “ontological insecurity” he described in his review of

Wittgenstein’s Mistress, the fear that he somehow doesn’t exist—and because the most effective way that Wallace has found to assuage that fear is through writing and publishing his work, it’s pretty easy to understand why he rankled at any pronouncement of authorial demise. Already, by the end of 1991, post-Broom Wallace is on record as having revised his basic understanding of how good fiction operates, moving away from an apathetic appraisal of the reader. Wallace’s rhetoric gets a bit thick here, but this is the way he characterizes his thoughts on good fiction’s basic machinery: “For those of us civilians who know in our gut that writing is an act of communication between one human being and another, the whole questions seems sort of arcane” (3). In this closing, Wallace once again affirms his commitment to sublimating intellectual or theoretical concerns in favor of cultivating a connection with readers that feels gut-level real and has the capacity to open lines of communication between writer and audience.

There can be little doubt that Wallace’s own “Wittgensteinian method” operates in the ways he describes Hix’s as working, and when Wallace turns this analytical method on the word/concept of “addiction,” he extends it out from himself while also complicating the usual received meaning of it. Wallace sees the conditions of American consumer culture as symptoms of addiction. And Wallace sees addiction as a spiritual disease—a manifestation of our desire to find something worthy of giving ourselves away to. That we seem to choose the least

116

redemptive, empty, or dangerous objects of worship like entertainment, our “watchability,” or drugs exhibits the addict’s decision-making process, favoring the easy or pleasurable over the difficult or unpleasant.

Toward Infinite Jest

By the time Wallace published “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction” in the summer 1993 issue of the Review of Contemporary Fiction, one of the final critical pieces from his inter-novel period (and the last that I examine in Chapter 3), Wallace had been sober for almost four years, and his recovery-inspired ethic was on display in its full, mature form. In the essay’s closing section, the unironic attitude cultivated by twelve-step programs—one that he initially dismissed out of hand as too clichéd or simplistic to be useful—is plainly visible.

Wallace took to heart AA’s warnings about what the mind was capable of rationalizing when left to its own devices, and had internalized the 12-step cliché that warns against his natural tendency toward abstract intellectualizing: “my best thinking got me here.”

Revising his thesis from “Fictional Futures”—that the theoretical inflection of his generation’s fiction was defensible because it avoided Realism’s reification of addictive

American culture—Wallace abandons any notion of a fiction driven by theory as redemptive and instead calls for writers “who dare to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse single-entendre values. Who treat old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction” (192-193).

Wallace’s realization that theory had failed him in a fundamental sense is analogous to the experience of “hitting bottom” in the substance addiction narrative. It is this bottoming out that finally forces the addict to consider that her coping mechanisms are insufficient to sustain her, that her understanding of reality and how to move within it is incommensurate with the facts

117

of lived experience. Wallace wrote to Franzen shortly after he arrived at Granada house about what getting sober has done to his writing:

[R]ight now I’m a pathetic and very confused young man, a failed writer at 28, who is so jealous, so sickly searingly envious of you and Vollmann and Mark Leyner and even David Fuckwad Leavitt and any young man who is right now producing pages with which he can live and even approving them off some base-clause of conviction about the enterprise’s meaning and end that I consider suicide a reasonable—if not at this point a desirable—option with respect to the whole wretched problem. (Max 143)

He reluctantly acknowledged that he might suffer from “a basically vapid urge to be avant-garde and poststructural and linguistically callisthenic—this is why I get very spiny when I think someone’s suggesting this may be my root motive and character; because I’m afraid it might be”

(Max 145). It’s not so much that theory failed Wallace, but that Wallace’s abuse of theory failed his fiction. Wallace had to find a new motivation to write fiction; writing avant-garde fiction in order to be regarded as an avant-garde fiction was no longer sufficient to sustain Wallace’s writing.

Wallace’s mature writing couldn’t have happened without substituting the goal of communicating with the reader for the “vapid urge to be avant-garde and poststructural,” a goal that wouldn’t have occurred to Wallace before his newly accomplished sobriety (145). Wallace’s rejection of theory-forward fiction is a bit more complex than his simply going cold theoretical turkey. At the end of the day, recovering from theory didn’t mean that Wallace maintained a prohibition against any and all ideas from outside thinkers in his fiction; to write for the reader while enforcing such a rule would obviously prove impossible. Rather Wallace’s theory recovery meant that any outside ideas he incorporated into his fiction had to serve the already preexisting ends of that fiction.

In the nascent sobriety that his participation in 12-step recovery programs afforded,

David Foster Wallace realized and began to confront the difficult parts of both his writing and

118

his personal life that he’d been dodging. This kind of “clarity” is precisely what most addicts desperately try to avoid through substance abuse; the goal is oblivion, not awareness. But as he sobered up, Wallace made explicit connections between his excessive use of and dependence on drugs and alcohol and his writing difficulties. And to a degree, he was right: He couldn’t progress past theory-centric writing until he got sober—and even then he could progress only with great difficulty until he had accumulated enough sober time and the “fog of sobriety”14 had lifted.

As it did, Wallace started to emerge from this difficult but necessary liminal period of personal transition, and almost immediately things begin to break Wallace’s way. Except for a two-week period in November of 1991, David Foster Wallace would stay sober and out of medical institutions until November of 2007, when he again decided his medication was holding his writing back. But for now, Wallace’s recovery stuck, and in the two years that followed,

Wallace started writing fiction again. By April of 1992, he had sent 250 pages of draft materials for his next novel, Infinite Jest, to Bonnie Nadell. Michael Pietsch at Little, Brown offered

$80,000 for Wallace’s new project the next month. Wallace travelled to Illinois to interview for a position in the Illinois State English Department in February of 1993. By July, David Foster

Wallace found himself unpacking his things in Bloomington-Normal, Illinois, the most recent tenure-track hire of ISU.

Clear-eyed, resolutely sober, and disabused of the value of cleverness and theory for their own sake, in his second novel, Wallace would “use” those theories that he only “mentioned” in his first, responding to the challenge confronting any writer brazen enough to attempt “serious” literature after postmodernism. By Infinite Jest, Wallace had developed a writing ethic that is

14 This phrasing is from a letter David Markson wrote to Wallace, who at the time was recently sober and living at Granada House.

119

something like a pragmatic amalgam of Wittgenstein and AA’s notions of meaning-as-use. His personal experiences of addiction and recovery having changed what he lets himself get away with in his fiction, theory- and form-wise, Wallace’s mature work legitimizes its theory through use.

120

CHAPTER 4 BIG BOOKS: INFINITE JEST AND THE LITERATURE OF RECOVERY

There must be something solemn, serious, and tender about any attitude which we denominate religious. If glad, it must not grin or snicker; if sad, it must not scream or curse. It is precisely as being solemn experiences that I wish to interest you in religious experiences. … The divine shall mean for us only such a primal reality as the individual feels impelled to respond to solemnly and gravely, and neither by a curse nor a jest.

—William James The Varieties of Religious Experience

But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness.

—David Foster Wallace This Is Water

The “Normal Wallace”

Chapter 4 corresponds with the final stage of the substance- and theory-addict’s narratives, focuses on Wallace’s life and writing in active recovery during his time in

Bloomington-Normal, IL. Chapter 4’s central claim is that after entering recovery, Wallace’s use of theory moved beyond didactic narrative digressions into others’ thinking in favor of deep fictional meditations on the psychic and material consequences of theory’s praxis for flesh-and- blood human beings. In it, I cast Wallace’s second novel, Infinite Jest, as a sobriety-inflected revision of his first, The Broom of the System. At 1,100 pages, Wallace’s last novel is comprised of three carefully interwoven plotlines and populated by hundreds of characters. But it is first and foremost Wallace’s attempt to produce a novel equal to the task of capturing the unease he felt was a symptom of a contemporary American culture that made poor choices, gave itself away to the wrong things, and was uniquely obsessed with entertaining itself over all else, content to be distracted even to the point of its own demise. Ultimately, the novel suggests that making

121

difficult choices—especially those that involve choosing pain over pleasure—may be too demanding for a culture where being interesting to look at represents the apogee of human value.

By the time he moved back to Illinois, David Foster Wallace was three and a half years sober. In July of 1993, Wallace moved into a house he’d rented from a member of the ISU search committee, bringing the unfinished drafts of Infinite Jest1 with him. His worldview had changed dramatically since he’d hit bottom in late 1989, not only with regard to his attitude toward his ability to manage his substance abuse alone, but in terms of how he approached his fiction. He had, Max writes, “no tolerance for the person he was and gave no quarter to writers whom he thought were like the writer he used to be” (178). The Wallace who was now the newest member of the English faculty at Illinois was one who had begun applying the lessons he’d learned in recovery to his fiction; lessons that came codified in clichés like “it works if you work it” or “one day at a time.” Wallace no longer wrote in all-night jags, working in fits and starts. Working on such a long project, Wallace embraced the comparatively unglamorous work of grinding out pages on a slower schedule, knowing that working at a measured, steady pace was the only sustainable way he could finish his latest undertaking. And his new approach had been paying off: by the time he arrived in Bloomington, Wallace had already completed “nearly three quarters” of his next novel (Max 183).

One of Wallace’s first priorities after moving to Bloomington was to find a new recovery group—not just to find a new sponsor for himself, but to sponsor other addicts as well. Max describes a Wallace who was deeply committed to helping others maintain their sobriety: “He was always available to help other members with both spiritual and practical questions, rewriting

1 It is difficult to date the genesis Infinite Jest. When asked in 2002 when he began writing it, Wallace responded that he had started the project “several times. ’86, ’88, ’89. None of it worked or was alive. And then in ’91-’92 all of a sudden it did” (qtd. in Max 318, note 15).

122

their job applications or professional correspondence” (179). Ever the overachiever, Wallace often attended additional recovery meetings and sponsored addicts at the Lighthouse Institute, a recovery facility where court-ordered addicts were sent (179-180).

However, the newly-transplanted Wallace was having difficulty regaining his writing momentum. Having spent days “staring at the ceiling” in his new house unable to resume work on his project, Wallace even “asked a friend…to call him every night to make sure he had written, hoping that guilt would spur him to productivity,” but even that plan hadn’t worked.

(183). What got Wallace moving again on Infinite Jest, Max writes, was to draw on “the patience and endurance he had learned in recovery” (184). And what Wallace had learned was that there was no easy way out—no magic bullet or hidden secret to writing: he simply had to put in the work. Or perhaps a better way to explain this change in Wallace’s ethic and methods is that his lack of understanding about how recovery worked was what helped him. For someone who’d had such success analyzing and articulating the complex arguments of literary theory or following the difficult mathematic formulations of modal logic, Wallace found recovery to be a complete enigma. As he told friends: “I don’t know how recovery works…but it works” (179).

What kept Wallace sober was “working it”—showing up, day in and day out. In fact, the paradoxical nature of recovery—that it worked despite the clichés Wallace felt were too simple to explain the results he’d achieved—drove Wallace to (as the AA adage goes) “keep coming back.” If Wallace felt he’d “figured out” or “solved” how recovery worked, his tendency might have been to dismiss it after having satisfied his intellectual curiosity or to search for a shortcut in the system once he felt he’d mastered its logic—neither of which would have augured well for his continued sobriety.

123

Armed with this recovery-inspired work ethic, Wallace’s time at ISU—ten years, all told—would be the most productive period in his life. As Charles Harris writes of Wallace’s tenure at ISU in an essay-length remembrance: “Not only did he finish Infinite Jest, the work that will ensure his permanence, but he assembled his first essay collection, A Supposedly Fun Thing

I’ll Never Do Again (1997), and his second collection of short fiction, Brief Interviews with

Hideous Men (1999), as well as completing his nonfiction book on mathematical infinity,

Everything and More (2003)” (Harris 170). Harris also mentions the work Wallace completed in

Bloomington for those publications that would appear in the years immediately following his departure from ISU: “Wallace also wrote many of the stories and essays later collected in

Oblivion (2004) and Consider the Lobster (2006), respectively, and he began his final novel,”

The Pale King, which would be published posthumously in 2011 (Harris 170-171).

Wallace was trying to apply what he’d learned in recovery to other parts of his personal life as well. Wallace had never been happy when he was single, but he also knew his personal relationships with women affected his sobriety, which his writing depended on. But in recovery, he no longer required the old divisions between his work, personal relationships, and writing.

Shortly after arriving in Bloomington, he started seeing Kymberly Harris, the daughter of

Victoria and Charles Harris—the latter of whom was Wallace’s department head in English at

ISU2. In addition to giving Kymberly Harris sections of Infinite Jest to read, Wallace also gave her a copy of the Big Book, Alcoholics Anonymous (Max 181).

That Wallace was recovering from theory addiction was perhaps most evident in his teaching at ISU. Students in his first courses there—a pair of fiction workshops (undergraduate

2 Wallace’s introduction to Kymberly Harris was far from a chance encounter; when he first met her mother, Victoria had shown him her picture and asked, “Isn’t she beautiful?” She then added: “You should marry her” (Max 181).

124

and graduate) in the fall of 1993—found him a “pedagogic hardass” intent on dissuading any version of his younger self he encountered from repeating the mistakes Wallace had made as a beginning writer. In his undergraduate workshop, he singled out one student who had made the mistake of impressing the class with “a voicy, ironic short story,” immediately taking him out into the hallway to tell him he’d “never witnessed a collective dick-sucking like that before”

(187). For the rest of the term, Wallace never missed an opportunity to pepper the student with public criticism (188).

In his graduate fiction workshop, those students who had come to ISU because of its reputation for producing writers of theoretical fiction found David Wallace to be thoroughly traditional in his classroom despite his early fiction’s heavy reliance on name-dropping theorists and philosophers. Max writes that on the first day of class, Wallace “put the names of major literary theorists on the blackboard” and then informed them: “I know about all this stuff. You don’t need to remind me of it” (188). Wallace’s ideas about the purpose of fiction were inflected by his recovery: he now saw abstract intellectualizing as a way to avoid the difficult task of honest engagement with the reader, and a dodge that led to disengaged, showy, and ultimately hollow writing.

In the fall of 1994, Wallace was teaching an “undergraduate introductory course on literature,” which Max characterizes as fulfilling Wallace’s “quiet wish since coming to ISU”

(197). Unlike his creative-writing courses, the undergraduate survey course was a “return to teaching’s first purpose” (197). For someone who had written The Broom of the System and Girl with Curious Hair, Wallace’s syllabus featured what might at first seem like a surprising amount of novels by popular writers like Jackie Collins, Stephen King, and Tom Clancy. But Wallace’s choices demonstrate how theory recovery had radically changed his criteria for determining a

125

piece of fiction’s value. What he now knew, and what he was teaching in both his writing and literature courses, was that fiction didn’t need to be intellectually dense in order to tell a good story. One student characterized Wallace’s pedagogical method in his survey course as “an engineer of literature” who highlighted “the building blocks of stories—voice narrative structure,

[and] point of view” to help his students understand how fiction worked (198). Back when he was an MFA student, these traditional elements of fiction were the last thing on his priority list.

But as a teacher, Wallace’s priorities were reversed. By presenting these “building blocks” as the starting point for studying literature, Wallace ensured that his students didn’t repeat his mistakes.

D.T. Max characterizes Wallace after Girl with Curious Hair as having a “crisis of confidence,” one that, in addition to the “fog” of his new sobriety, paralyzed his will and left him with writer’s block for the first time. Describing this mental state to Jonathan Franzen, Wallace wrote, “I have in the last two years been struck dumb…. Not dumb, actually, or even aphasic.

It’s more like, w/r/t things I used to believe and let inform me, my thoughts now have the urgent but impeded quality of speechlessness in dreams” (Max 144). This was due at least in part because Wallace had intended with GWCH to write “a traditionally moral novel,” but looking back on what he had produced, felt that most of the stories, which depend on outside theorists or writers, had failed. Unable to give up his reliance on theory, even the piece that was supposed to condemn bad metafiction, “Westward,” ended up as a long example of the kind of writing he condemned as empty or solipsistic.

But Wallace’s rejection of theory-forward fiction was a bit more complex than simply going cold theoretical turkey. As D.T. Max smartly asks: given how much stock Wallace placed in “serious fiction” that acknowledged continental philosophy’s recent literary encroachments, by what theory had Wallace abandoned literary theory? (289) At the end of the day, recovering

126

from theory meant giving up the crutch of shallow engagement with ideas poached from big- name theorists, but it didn’t mean that Wallace maintained a prohibition against any and all ideas from outside thinkers in his fiction; to write for the reader while enforcing such a rule would obviously have proved impossible.

This new concern for the reader finds its twelve-step analogue in the Big Book chapter titled “Into Action.” According to this (collective-second-person narrated) section, recovering addicts who have honestly and diligently worked the preceding steps can expect to “see how our experience can benefit others. That feeling of uselessness and self-pity will disappear. We will lose interest in selfish things and gain interest in our fellows. Self-seeking will slip away. Our whole attitude and outlook upon life will change…. We will intuitively know how to handle situations which used to baffle us” (81-82). Ultimately, the purpose of Alcoholics Anonymous is not simply to keep its members sober, but to restore their usefulness to others: “At the moment we are trying to put our lives in order. But this is not an end in itself. Our real purpose it to fit ourselves to be of maximum service to God and the people about us” (77). This feeling of usefulness is impossible for an alcoholic in isolation, where the “self-will run riot” (62) indulges itself at the expense of others. There is no doubt that the program’s emphasis on “use” and

“usefulness” resonated with Wallace, given the long sections of his first novel that deal specifically with Wittgenstein’s conceptions of “meaning” and “use.” One wonders if it had previously occurred to Wallace to understand himself in terms of these same concepts; regardless, there would have been no escaping the implications in recovery that his own meaning was directly tied to his usefulness to others, and that what had rendered him useless was addiction. Wallace’s first-hand experience with these Big Book passages in a twelve-step-group setting is evident in some of his notes from this period. Tucked in one of the Ransom Center’s

127

folders of Infinite Jest’s draft materials are two pages from one of Wallace’s yellow legal pads.

Under the title “Heard at Meetings” are two sentences penciled in miniscule hand: “The happiness of being with people. Just a person among people” (see fig. 4-1 and 4-2).

William James as Recovery Theorist

There is one thinker who survives Wallace’s “theory recovery” and who makes several appearances in Infinite Jest, though not in the fashion that Wittgenstein and Derrida are deployed in The Broom of the System. That philosopher is William James. But first, an attempt to answer

Max’s question: if David Foster Wallace is taking his cues from William James, or at least the

James that survives in the Alcoholics Anonymous literature he’s reading at meetings and at

Granada house around this time, what was it that motivated him to incorporate James into his writing at the expense of his earlier theoretical or philosophical influences? The pragmatic system proposed by James—open-ended, wary of the foreclosure of future possibility that comes with a sense of certainty—served Wallace’s new writing goals better than the aporias and indeterminacies of poststructuralism. It is less prescriptive in its insistence on an “ever not quite to all our formulations” (McDermott 38:58) of the world and assesses value according to outcomes for human agents. For William James, no final ethical systemization is possible because his pragmatic philosophy acknowledges the fluctuations in ethical standards and conceptions of truth that occur as necessary consequences of differences in time and culture. But this constant state of flux should not deter interested thinkers from writing down their ideas so as to clarify their philosophical propositions through open and honest engagement with others.

Toward the end of his introduction to Wallace’s thesis, James Ryerson writes about the problem of determining value among competing systems of seemingly-equal validity:

Because all language and thought take place inside some language game or other, there is no transcendent, non-language-game standpoint from which you can step back, as it were, and see if any language game is better than any other—if one of

128

them, for instance, does a better job of mirroring reality than another. Indeed, the question of whether any language game accurately represents reality can be asked only within some other language game, which operates according to its own set of nonevaluable conventions. (30)

But is this true? James seems to claim just the opposite, disagreeing with this assessment (and finding fault with its implied premises regarding the worth of any “objective” reality that language might describe). James’s strategy, a method whose appellation, “pragmatism,” he reluctantly assented to, was deceptively simple: when forced to decide a “winner” from among a number of systems that seem equally valid, the single criterion for judging value is its consequence for the human beings who will rise or fall according to the tenets and prescriptions of that system:

The pragmatic method is primarily a method of settling metaphysical disputes that otherwise might be interminable. Is the world one or many?—fated or free?— material or spiritual?—here are notions either of which may or may not hold good of the world; and disputes over such notions are unending. The pragmatic method in such cases is to try to interpret each notion by tracing its respective practical consequences. What difference would it practically make to anyone if this notion rather than that notion were true? If no practical difference whatever can be traced, then the alternatives mean practically the same thing, and all dispute is idle. Whenever a dispute is serious, we ought to be able to show some practical difference that must follow from one side or the other’s being right. (Pragmatism 28)

The third phase of David Foster Wallace’s writing, with its “single-entendre” commitments, corresponds to Wallace’s realization that he has the choice to set aside the isolating consequences of Wittgenstein’s conclusions about the unbridgeable gap between language and any possible objective world. In this phase, Wallace’s writing becomes more pragmatic; it counters Wittgenstein’s solipsism with the Jamesian conclusion that “even if we cannot objectively know the world, our actions have consequences within it” (McDermott 26:30). If we are all denied access to any “objective” knowledge about the world because of the limits of our language, then any world beyond the one we can know matters very little. Yet as I have argued,

129

Wallace’s mature writing does not completely abandon his earlier belief that “serious writing” was theoretically engaged. Rather, in his later writing, Wallace filters his use of theory through the lessons he’d learned in recovery.

In this final phase of Wallace’s writing, I propose that Wallace’s assessment of other writers’ underlying metaphysical outlooks becomes increasingly important. As one critic in the recent anthology Gesturing Toward Reality: David Foster Wallace and Philosophy notes,

“Wallace is particularly good at unmasking the metaphysical arguments contained in or concealed by logical ones” (Durantaye 22). Unlike in Broom, when philosophical or theoretical ideas appear in Wallace’s later writing, they are always deployed with an eye toward their possible ethical consequences and propensities for misuse. If an idea’s implicit metaphysics is one that potentially tears down or blocks the connection between human beings, or which purposefully obfuscates meaning through language, or dwells in verbal abstraction to the point of paralysis, Wallace doesn’t use or mention it without qualification. And if, as Max suspects,

Wallace needed another theorist to lend credence to his approach, James would have served his revised purposes.

As with The Varieties of Religious Experience, Infinite Jest’s “method” is in the presentation of personal narratives of transformation and recovery. In Varieties, the individual stories conform to the standard, three-part “recovery” or “conversion” model. But often, in

James’s account of the critical middle step—the addict’s experience of hitting bottom and the subsequent epiphanic realization that propels him into the narrative’s third and final part— remains hazy for readers. This is primarily because of the paradoxical nature of personal epiphany: for the person who experiences it, the epiphany carries the literally life-altering force of divinely revealed truth, but in trying to communicate the experience of what this shift in

130

personal worldview actually felt like, no words will call it forth with sufficient force. The person, however transformed, must still rely on metaphor or analogy or narrative devices, which ultimately fail to fully communicate the depth of such a numinous experience. Failing to understand how the epiphanies account for the radical changes in James’s various narratives, the narratives’ effect on the reader is finally one of confusion or of frustration—not enlightenment or transcendence. Though Infinite Jest is modeled in part on The Varieties of Religious Experience

(Wallace once wrote to Sven Birkerts that the novel was “a kind of contemporary Jamesian melodrama”), Wallace sidesteps this narrative trap and finally finds a way to make good on his critique of Markson’s “explanation” for the narrator’s mental state as outlined in “The Empty

Plenum”—and all by repurposing a technique he attempted but failed to properly bring off in

Broom (Max 191).

William James knew that religious experiences could not be externally verified by outside authority however epiphanic or life-alteringly meaningful they may be. Wallace knows the nature of hitting bottom and the opening of possibility it makes possible. But he also knows language is an insufficient vehicle for conveying the life-changing weight of an epiphany. What

Wallace seems to want to offer us in Infinite Jest is that post-epiphanic mindset that enabled him to accept help and enter recovery. In keeping with what he wrote in “The Empty Plenum” about insufficient explanations and back-stories making it harder for readers to empathize with fictional characters, Wallace chooses to leave out the particulars of Hal and Gately hitting bottom from the narrative. They exist just outside the bounds of the text, but because we see Hal and Gately both before and after their epiphanic experiences, we are faced with the simple truth that they have changed—just not how. In choosing to leave out the “hitting bottom” portions of the usual three-part narrative of addiction, it would seem, in keeping with his idea that providing

131

explanations for characters makes a reader less able to empathize with them, that Wallace sought to make it easier for readers to believe that radical life change was possible for these characters, and in turn, for us as well.

The influence of William James on the thought and writing of David Foster Wallace appears only sporadically in the related critical literature.3 A notable exception, one of the two focused treatments of the connections between James and Wallace to date, is David H. Evans’s essay in Boswell and Burn’s excellent anthology, A Companion to David Foster Wallace

Studies. Titled “The Chains of Not Choosing: Free Will and Faith in William James and David

Foster Wallace,” Evans’s central thesis is 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” (Evans 172).

As evidence, he cites three particular instances: first, Wallace’s response during a 1996 interview with Salon’s Laura Miller, wherein he mentions James’s The Varieties of Religious

Experience in a list of writers “who made him ‘feel unalone—intellectually, emotionally, spiritually…human and unalone and…in a deep, significant conversation with another consciousness in fiction and poetry” (172). Evans connects this response with the appearance of that same text in Wallace’s fiction, noting that Infinite Jest’s Randy Lenz “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’

3 Marshall Boswell’s “Trickle-Down Citizenship: Taxes and Civic Responsibility in The Pale King” and his chapter on Infinite Jest in Understanding David Foster Wallace, Robert K. Bolger’s “A Less ‘Bullshitty’ Way to Live: The Pragmatic Spirituality of David Foster Wallace,” and Casey Michael Henry’s 2015 “Sudden Awakening to the Fact That the Mischief Is Irretrievably Done: Epiphanic Structure in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest.”

132

(IJ 543) better known as The Varieties of Religious Experience4” (171). In the secondary literature, Evans points out that while the introduction to Wallace’s recently-published philosophy thesis mentions “Descartes, Voltaire, Sartre, J. L. Austin, Derrida, and above all

Wittgenstein,” its author (and Wallace’s own thesis advisor) James Ryerson “never mentions

James, despite the fact that the latter’s Pragmatism anticipates some of the central themes of

[Wittgenstein’s] Philosophical Investigations” (172). Indeed, Wallace names at least two pragmatic philosophers in what is surely the central node of what Adam Kelly has called the

Wallace “essay-interview nexus”: the 1993 interview with Larry McCaffery. When listing the authors who’ve “rung his cherries,” Wallace names not only James but the later pragmatist thinker J. L. Austin.

Casey Michael Henry, in an excellent genetic examination of Infinite Jest’s draft materials recently published in Critique, also notices the connections between the novel and

William James. Henry suggests that the epiphany, (a type of numinous experience) is the central organizing structure for Infinite Jest. Henry writes that there were many allusions to James in the drafts of Infinite Jest that were cut before its final published form, including explicit allusions “to the ‘Sick Soul’ and ‘Divided Self’ chapters of James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience”

(484). Henry’s main claim involves the assertion that Infinite Jest’s enormous narrative both requires and omits the “epiphanic” portions of its protagonists’ stories: the missing sections of

Hal Incandenza and Don Gately’s stories where they hit bottom. Because of Infinite Jest’s circular narrative chronology, Hal Incandenza’s epiphany must take place in the space between

4 As the author of the other extended examination of the influence of William James in Wallace’s work, Casey Michael Henry, writes: “The conscious alignment of Lenz and James is obvious from Wallace’s evolution of thinking. In his first handwritten manuscripts, Lenz originally hides his cocaine in the Gould Medical Dictionary, which by later transcripts has been modified, explicitly, to James’s The Principles of Psychology and The Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion. The transition suggests a shift from biological explanations for actions—present in the Medical Dictionary—to psychological and religious explanations—present in the Principles and Lectures on Natural Religion” (“Sudden” 488).

133

the novel’s ending and the chronologically final episode of Hal’s narrative that happens in the novel’s opening section. Henry characterizes Infinite Jest’s entire narrative form as following the blueprint laid out by William James: “the whole novel is…in Jamesian terms, a divided self struggling for reunification across the final break” (494).

One area of thematic overlap in James and Wallace’s work is worth mentioning here— that of their almost biological scorn for deterministic strains of thought. James scholar John J.

McDermott notes that “For William James, we are makers not only of things but of meaning as well” (5:30) who should always “be alert to premature clarity, which can close off possibilities available but not yet apparent” (21:26).

This focus on the human ability (or responsibility) to “make meaning” from experience is one that shows up with frequency in Wallace’s work. D.T. Max writes that Infinite Jest is singularly concerned with “how to live meaningfully in the present” (215). Like James, who was writing against a current of scientific and philosophical determinism that prevailed in the waning years leading of the nineteenth century, the determinism that Wallace writes against was one that he saw as permeating American culture, an ironic detachment that had been learned from postmodern literature and then commodified and widely disseminated via television. That humans make meaning is a concept known as “constructivism” in contemporary psychology and philosophy. Perhaps it is no accident that of the theoretical approaches Wallace found harmful in

American postmodernism, the strain that clearly stands in nominal opposition to constructivism is “deconstruction.”

The Influence of William James in Infinite Jest

At over one thousand pages and featuring more than two hundred characters, Infinite Jest takes place in the near-dystopian near future of the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment. (In the novel, years are no longer referred to by sequential numbers; the naming rights for each year

134

are now sold to the highest corporate bidder. Further complicating the novel’s diegetic timeline is the fact that the novel’s chronology is non-linear, and its closing paragraph sends the reader back around to the beginning of the novel to find out what happens to the protagonists, whom readers don’t generally recognize as such on their first read-through.) The bulk of the novel’s action takes place at a pair of interconnected Boston locations: Ennet House, a halfway house run by staffer and recovering addict Don Gately, and the Enfield Tennis Academy, run by the idiosyncratic Incandenza family, whose middle son Hal is the E. T. A. narrative’s focus. After the disbanding of N. A. T. O., the United States, Canada, and Mexico are now allied under the banner of the Organization of North American Nations, which alliance gives rise to the novel’s third subplot, connecting the other two. A group of Quebecois separatists known as the

Wheelchair Assassins plans to terrorize O.N.A.N.’s population by disseminating copies of E. T.

A. founder and experimental auteur James Incandenza’s film, (also called Infinite Jest). The film is something of an urban legend, a movie so entertaining that people who watch it lose all interest in anything but immediately rewatching it, over and over, foregoing food and personal hygiene until they eventually expire in front of the screen.

As I have argued, Wallace’s thematic interests remain effectively the same throughout his writing. The difference between his two novels, however, lies in the way they respond to these themes; more specifically, the difference lies in the way Wallace’s writing responds to the problems these themes present for his characters.

The years between Broom and Infinite Jest had taught Wallace that while the conclusions of philosophy and theory may be logically impossible to refute on their own terms, that living by those conclusions was, at least for him, untenable. That at some level the fact that he worried that

135

he might not exist meant that whether the idea of self was logically coherent or not mattered very little.

Recovery introduced Wallace to another kind of theory, one that evaluated the strength of its arguments not by pointing to the unimpeachable logic of how it proceeded from premise to conclusion, but by the consequences of its conclusions for human actors. Or as it appears in the text of Infinite Jest: “logical validity is not a guarantee of truth” (202). The pragmatic philosophy of William James shaped the recovery program of Alcoholics Anonymous that saved his life.

James’s philosophy brings Wittgenstein’s conclusions about language out of the bloodless world of linguistic abstraction and into the human world of lived experience. There may be valid arguments as to the linguistic differences between “abstinence” and “recovery,” but the material and psychic difference between “abstaining” from drugs and “recovering” from them may literally be the difference between life and death for an addict.

In his second novel, Wallace applied the lessons of James’s pragmatism to evaluate his fiction’s use of theory. What resulted from this mature method was a deep mediation on addiction, loneliness, and the importance of choice in an American culture whose conditions produced a feeling of isolation so total that it elevated entertainment to the status of virtue.

Infinite Jest dared to confront this loneliness not by entertaining readers, but by exposing the source of their despair as a consequence of what they had chosen to give themselves away to, what they had chosen to worship. The novel exposes entertainment for what it is: not an answer to loneliness, but a distraction from it. Overcoming this loneliness, Wallace had learned in AA, required restoring himself to use, a process that required more work than the passive temporary solution of distraction. The solution was to risk the kind of communication and attempts at community that Wallace could not yet attempt in Broom. One of the ways Wallace tries to offer

136

solutions in his second novel is by revising the mistakes he made with the application of theory in his first.

Infinite Jest’s Pragmatic Revisions to The Broom of the System

Infinite Jest revisits key tropes from The Broom of the System in order to own up to and emend them with his recovery-inspired pragmatic approach to theory. One of the ways that

Infinite Jest uses James’s pragmatism to revise Broom’s shallow engagement with Wittgenstein is to show the consequences of protracted solipsism for human actors.

In Broom, Wallace dramatized the consequences of solipsism via Lenore Beadsman’s fear that her “self” was nothing more than a linguistic construct, that there was no difference between her life and a character in a novel, that she was nothing more than what could be said about her. While searching for her missing great-grandmother (who has the same name as

Lenore and who was a student of Wittgenstein) her solipsistic fear is assuaged by her brother

LaVache, who tells her that Gramma Lenore has disappeared in order to give her the space to define herself in her namesake’s absence. This explanation seems to suffice for younger Lenore, but LaVache’s explanation is undercut by the metafictional nature of Broom—at the end of the day, the joke’s on her: Lenore is, in fact, only a character in a story.

But in Wallace’s second novel, he chooses not to play the consequences of solipsism for laughs. In addition, unlike the solipsistic unease that Lenore feels in Broom, which we must accept without any indication of its cause, in Infinite Jest, Wallace not only refuses to go easy on characters who are content to live inward-turned, solipsistic lives, but provides a legitimate reason for their state of isolation. In a passage from Infinite Jest that depicts a phone conversation between Orin and Hal Incandenza, the two eldest sons of ETA’s founder, the narrator gives us a bit of insight into what Hal, who has just returned to his dorm from smoking pot, is thinking: “Hal never liked talking on the phone after he’d gotten high in secret down in

137

the Pump Room. Even if there was water or liquid handy to keep the cotton at bay. He didn’t know why this was so. It just made him uneasy” (136). But further than the emotional discomfort, the effort of communication with another person—his own brother—causes a kind of spiraling involution in his thinking itself: “It occurred to Hal that although he lied about meaningless details to Orin on the phone it had never occurred to him to consider whether Orin was ever doing the same thing. This induced a spell of involuted marijuana-type thinking that led quickly, again, to Hal’s questioning whether or not he was really all that intelligent” (136). As regards meaning and use, Hal’s use of pot has become such a part of his consciousness that it is the sole ordering force that confers meaning on his experiences; as he will remark later in the novel: “It occurred to me that without some one-hitters to be able to look forward to smoking alone in the tunnel I was waking up every day feeling as though there was nothing in the day to anticipate or lend anything any meaning” (853). To borrow a phrase from deconstructive criticism, Hal is the novel’s empty center.

Because of the novel’s circular structure, the ultimate effect of Hal’s habitual marijuana use is revealed to the reader in the opening scene. In it, Hal has quit smoking, but the consequences of having habituated himself to an isolated interior life due to the discomfort of interacting with others while on drugs renders him literally unable to communicate with the other people in the room. Hal’s repeated statements about not being able to “make himself understood,” along with the horrific reactions to the “animal sounds” and “flailing” that everyone else in the room sees as Hal tries to speak and move, serve as something of an opening set piece where Wallace achieves the dramatizing of Wittgenstein’s philosophy that he attempted with

Broom and later admitted failing to pull off in “The Empty Plenum.”

138

Perhaps Infinite Jest’s most startling revision of a trope from The Broom of the System involves an actual broom. For purposes of comparison, here again is the only passage where the word “broom” appears in Wallace’s first novel: “What she did with me [was to] take a straw broom and start furiously sweeping the floor, and she asked me which part of the broom was more elemental, more fundamental, the bristles or the handle…and finally when I said I supposed the bristles[, she yelled,] ‘Aha, that’s because you want to sweep with the broom, isn’t it?

Meaning as fundamentalness…Meaning as use’” (149-50). In this passage Broom’s broom functions as a rather hamfisted example of Wittgenstein’s language theory that a word’s meaning is determined by use.

By contrast, there is only one place in Infinite Jest that the word “broom” occurs. While sweeping up at the close of the day, Lucien Antitoi is murdered in the shop he co-owns with his brother with his own hand-carved broom by a member of a Quebecois separatist group. It is a scene of profound violence, certainly the most brutal in the novel, and Wallace chooses Lucien’s own personal and well-loved broom as the murder weapon. Wallace is drawing a deliberate parallel here. To amplify the point, the wheelchair assassin who murders Lucien has twice, in the same sentence, used the French word for “useless” to describe him before giving the word some particularly cruel emphasis when “the broom is shoved in and abruptly down by the big and collared A.F.R., thrust farther in, rhythmically, in strokes that accompany each syllable in the wearily repeated ‘In-U-Tile’” (488). Here, Wallace is openly and brutally chastising his previous novel: Yes, meaning is use, but what use one chooses is a far more important point in one’s day- to-day lived experience. As Wallace’s former department head in the ISU English department writes: Wallace’s mature engagement with the Wittgenstein’s concept of “‘meaning as use’ makes it possible to consider ‘the coherent possibility of things like ethics, values, spirituality &

139

responsibility,’ the ‘things most important’ to Wittgenstein—and to David Wallace—which the logically atomistic metaphysics of the Tractatus denied” (175). Wallace’s mature writing understands the consequences of Wittgenstein’s revisions in the Philosophical Investigations about how language operates—not as a map of an unknowable reality, but as mapped onto concrete experience where those words describe objects and actions with ethical and moral import. By literalizing the concept of “use” in terms of human cost, the novel can account for the

(in this case, extremely disturbing and violent) ethical and moral dimensions of “use” and

“meaning” in a way that the safety of Broom’s dialogic thought experiments about

Wittgenstein’s philosophy cannot.

Wallace’s mature opinion of the usefulness of theory is perhaps nowhere more clear than in the aforementioned conversation between Hal and Orin, during the portion of the conversation when they discuss their father’s suicide. Their conversation reveals that James Incandenza, the auteur responsible for the filmic Infinite Jest that appears in the novel, committed suicide by microwaving his own head:

[Hal:] ‘As we later reconstructed the scene, he’d used a wide-bit drill and a small hacksaw to make a head-sized hole in the oven door, then when he’d gotten his head in he’d carefully packed the extra space around his neck with wadded-up aluminum foil.’

[Orin:] ‘Sounds kind of ad hoc and jerry-rigged and haphazard.’

[Hal:] ‘Everybody’s a critic. This wasn’t an aesthetic endeavor.’ […]

[Orin:] ‘“Reconstructed the scene” as in the scene when you found him was somehow…deconstructed.”’

[Hal:] ‘You of all people, O. You know that was the one word he hated more than—’

[Orin:] ‘So burned then. Just say it. He was really really badly burned.’

‘…’ (250-251)

140

This is the only instance of “deconstruct” in any of the searchable electronic copies of Infinite

Jest. And given that one half of the “conversation” between theorists that Wallace explained was happening at the heart of his previous novel, I don’t think the lack of reference to Derrida’s theory is an oversight in Infinite Jest—rather the opposite. And when Orin uses the term

“deconstructed” as a euphemism for the post-microwave state of their father’s head, the communication between Orin and Hal is immediately interrupted. The intrusion of theory into the brothers’ conversation stops it in mid-sentence and can’t resume until Orin makes Hal speak his mind in plain language that won’t allow Hal to look away from the horror of the scene.

Another obvious about-face between Wallace’s first and second novels concerns his thinking about the cultural effects of television. One of Broom’s final vignettes is a broadcast of a religious program in which the televangelist Reverend Sykes is joined on screen by Lenore

Beadsman’s quasi-profound pet bird, Vlad the Impaler. Reverend Sykes, in his final exhortation to the late-night viewer watching at home, says: “Use me, friends. Let us play the game together.

I promise that no player will feel alone” (467). Syke’s words show the degree to which Broom toys with the idea of television as a solution to solipsism’s consequence—that we can never know anything outside our own thoughts; that is, television is held up as a technological solution capable of combating human loneliness by connecting viewers with the outside world. But by the time Wallace wrote Infinite Jest, his feelings about the possibility of a person finding real, meaningful, human connection alone in a room with a TV had changed radically. The televisions of Infinite Jest, “Interlace teleputers,” are clearly not vehicles for human connection, but rather devices that serve to only deepen viewers’ isolation. The “mass spectations” that occur throughout the novel instantiate the human need for connection coming to a sort of collective

141

head, finding what’s described as an almost orgiastic, ecstatic release in the flash-mob style spectations where everyone watches something together.

The Broom of the System’s ending evades Wittgenstein’s conclusions about solipsism with poststructuralist theory. But deconstruction’s metaphysics of absence did nothing to alleviate the fear and anxiety Wallace felt after reading Wittgenstein’s philosophy, and Broom’s ending reflects this: Its final pronouncement, its very conclusion, trails off in midsentence. In the place where we should find the novel’s final word on the matter, we instead find only silence, an unfinished thought, a deferral and a dodge. Broom ends this way in part because it has to: poststructuralism’s answer to solipsism’s conclusions—that either we can only fully know our own thoughts and nothing else is provable or that we can only know the world of sense experience and therefore our own thoughts and conception of self are what’s ultimately unknowable—is to offer that the self was always already a construction anyhow, a notion that offers little comfort.

By the time Wallace’s second novel concludes, what’s left unsaid doesn’t risk alienating readers so that it can get in one last metafictional wink as it does in Broom. Rather, Infinite Jest’s ending leaves us with questions about the resolution of conflicts within the fictional world of the novel (What's happening to Hal in the opening scene? What is the ultimate fate of the master cartridge of the Entertainment? Are we supposed to read Orin's fate literally? How is Gately talking to the wraith of James Incandenza?).

This is because Wallace succeeds in getting the reader invested in what happens to the novel’s characters, succeeds in forging a relationship with the reader. Furthermore, Wallace has dropped enough hints along the way to satisfy these narrative questions if we're reading closely.

And this is part of Wallace’s point: doing this attentive work is analogous to the reader holding

142

up her end of the conversation. This ratio of work vs. payoff is often cited by readers of Infinite

Jest—both its detractors and admirers. But as Max writes, Wallace’s long novel, “for all its putative difficulty, cares about the reader,” and if it denies readers “a conventional ending, it doesn’t do so out of malice; it does it out of concern, to provide a deeper palliative than realistic storytelling can, because, just as in Ennet House, you have to work to get better” (215). Infinite

Jest succeeds precisely because the amount of work one puts into reading it is repaid not only in the traditional sense of reading enjoyment, but more importantly in extratextual ways, in readers’ spheres of day-to-day existence outside the text: “Infinite Jest then didn’t just diagnose a malaise. It proposed a treatment…it spoke of the imminence of collapse and the possibility that one can emerge stronger” (214).

In its espionage-narrative, Infinite Jest levels a critique of an American culture unable or unwilling to do the work of assessing the moral worth of what it chooses as its ultimate pursuit: entertainment. Briefly: Agents Marathe (Canadian) and Steeply’s (American) story arc describes an attempt by Quebecois terrorists, reacting to the United States’s redrawing of its border with

Canada, to secure a master copy of James Incandenza’s film Infinite Jest. Marathe’s organization intends to clandestinely disseminate copies of the film to the American citizens and heads of state, rendering them comatose and, eventually, dead. In one of their exchanges, Marathe explains the logic of the Quebecois plan (in his idiosyncratic English) to Steeply: “This a U.S.A. production, this Entertainment cartridge. Made by an American man in the U.S.A. The appetite for the appeal of it: this is also U.S.A. The U.S.A. drive for spectation, which your culture teaches” (318). Marathe continues:

This I was saying: this is why choosing is everything…. These facts of situation, which speak so loudly of your Bureau’s fear of this samizdat: now is what has happened when a people choose nothing over themselves to love, each one. A U.S.A. that would die–and let its children die, each one–for the so-called perfect

143

Entertainment, this film…. Us, we will force nothing on U.S.A. persons in their warm homes. We will only make available. Entertainment. There will be then some choosing, to partake or choose not to. (318)

How and when the United States of the novel lost its collective ability to make choices in service of its own interests is not explained; Marathe only gestures vaguely to “Someone who had authority, or should have had authority and did not exercise authority. I do not know. Someone let your peoples forget it was the only thing of importance, choosing” (319). The concept of

American “freedom” is redefined here as the “freedom-from: no one tells your precious individual U.S.A. selves what they must do. It is this meaning only, this freedom from constraint and forced duress” (320). This duress is the “repugnant idea” in William James’s conceptualization of “choice”: “Effort of attention to a naturally repugnant idea is the essential feature of willing” (Principles 562), and in the near-future America of Infinite Jest, all the “effort of attention” seems directed at ensuring one’s “freedom from” anything unpleasant. Somewhere in American history, Marathe tells his American counterpart, “someone taught that temples are for fanatics only and took away the temples and promised there was no need for temples. And now there is no shelter. And not map for finding the shelter of a temple” (319-320). Marathe, like

Wallace, is trying to get his head around an American culture in which such ostensibly vaunted and unimpeachable ideals like “freedom” have been bled dry. In the United States of the novel, freedom— now divorced from its original context of colonial British rule of the American colonies, has come to signify quite a different yet unmistakably American idea: that it is the unassailable birthright of all U. S. citizens to live unfettered of all responsibilities outside themselves.

When David Lipsky asks about the origin of Infinite Jest’s title, Wallace eventually gets around to explaining what he wanted to do with the novel in terms of cultural critique:

144

The only thing that I knew for sure, I wanted to do something that wasn’t just high comedy, I wanted to do something that was very, very much about America. And the things that ended up for me being most distinctively American right now, around the millennium, had to do with both entertainment and about some kind of weird addictive, um… wanting to give yourself away to something [that] I ended up thinking was kind of a distorted religious impulse. And a lot of the AA stuff in the book was mostly an excuse, was to try to have – it’s very hard to talk about people’s relationship with any kind of God, in any book later than like Dostoyevsky. … Plausibly realistic characters don’t sit around talking about this stuff. You know?

So… I don’t know. But the minute I start talking about it, it just, it sounds number one: very vague. Two: really reductive. And the whole thing to me was so complicated, that you know it took sixteen hundred pages of sort of weird oblique stuff to even start to talk about it. And I feel stupid talking about it. (Lipsky 82)

In the America of Infinite Jest, so many of its characters—finding no other viable coping models available and nothing worth giving themselves away to—respond to the problem of solipsistic isolation with drug use and, eventually, addiction. But Wallace, not content to simply fictionalize the darker parts of his culture, offers the reader a possible alternative to addiction through the

AA sections of the narrative—and especially through one of the two principal characters, Don

Gately. Though Wallace’s early drafts contained a comparatively small amount of material about him, as Wallace’s sober time increased, so did the number of pages in the novel concerned with

Gately, the recovering Demerol addict and reformed felon turned halfway-house counselor (Max

190).

Toward the end of Infinite Jest, Gately’s character steps in to defend another member of a halfway house, Randy Lenz, who is being chased by a neighborhood resident after catching Lenz killing his (the neighborhood resident’s) dog. Though Lenz is probably guilty of whatever he’s being accused of, Gately nevertheless defends his halfway-house ward in a street fight that turns into a shooting in front of Ennet House. We rejoin Gately later in the narrative as he regains consciousness in a hospital. Though he is suffering from severe trauma and struggling to speak because of a breathing tube, he refuses the pain medication offered by doctors for fear of

145

jeopardizing his sobriety (Gately’s drug of choice before recovery was oral narcotics). Wallace explains the recovering addict’s difficult feat of restraint by letting us in on Gately’s coping technique: “Abiding. No one single instant of it was unendurable. Here was a second right here: he endured it. What was undealable-with was the thought of all the instants all lined up and stretching ahead, glittering” (860). This technique is one that Gately learned during a forced detox in jail: “Gately remembered some evil fucking personal detoxes.… Feeling the edge of every second that went by. Taking it a second at a time.… Any one second: he remembered: the thought of feeling like he’d be feeling this second for 60 more of these seconds–he couldn’t deal.

He could not fucking deal. He had to build a wall around each second just to take it” (859-60).

Said another way: the period of his withdrawal, like the pain he’s experiencing in the hospital, when conceptualized as a continuous, uninterrupted expanse of time, amounts to experiencing the entire aggregate effect of each moment simultaneously.

The fourth edition of AA’s Big Book stresses the importance of taking sobriety “one day at a time” in ten separate places (255, 286, 287, 288, 333, 345, 346, 401, 451, 528). But the passage that best explains the material reality of the adage appears in a section titled “The

Missing Link”:

A couple of members, realizing I was there for my first meeting, took me downstairs and sat down with me and outlined the program…. I remember telling these members that AA sounded like just what I needed, but I didn’t think I could stay sober for the rest of my life. Exactly how was I supposed to not drink if my girlfriend breaks up with me, or if my best friend dies, or even through happy times like graduations, weddings, and birthdays. They suggested I could just stay sober one day at a time. They explained that it might be easier to set my sights on the twenty- four hours in front of me and to take on these other situations when and if they ever arrived. I decided to give sobriety a try, one day at a time, and I’ve done it that way ever since. (286-287).

Like the anonymous author of “The Missing Link,” Gately’s solution is to choose to understand or idealize time as a series of static moments, separate from one another like the individual

146

frames of a film reel. Paradoxically, during this exercise, Gately realizes that he had “never before or since felt so excruciatingly alive. Living in the Present between pulses. It’s a gift, the

Now: it’s AA’s real gift: it’s no accident they call it The Present” (860). The phrasing of

Gately’s technique may sound familiar. Its source is taken from another theoretical work whose title is mentioned earlier in the narrative. The original formulation is from William James’s

Gifford Lectures, later published under the title The Varieties of Religious Experience.5

The conceptualization of time that Gately learned in AA derives from James’s description of a religious adherent who has achieved a certain kind of inner peace:

[She is] never anxious about the future, nor worr[ied] over the outcome of the day; [she] took cognizance of things, only as they were presented to her in succession, moment by moment. To her holy soul, the divine moment was the present moment…and when the present moment was estimated in itself and in its relations, and when the duty that was involved in it was accomplished, it was permitted to pass away as if it had never been, and to give way to the facts and duties of the moment which came after. (317-18)

Gately isn’t the only character in this section of the novel to profess the usefulness of this divide- and-abide method of enduring otherwise-unendurable stretches of time. Joelle van Dyne tells

Gately that without a mindset capable of living in the present, she isn’t surprised that her previous attempts at staying sober had failed:

‘This was why I couldn’t get off and stay off. Just as the cliché warns. I literally wasn’t keeping it in the day. I was adding the clean days up in my head.… I’d throw away the pipe and shake my fist at the sky and say As God is my fucking witness NEVER AGAIN, as of this minute right here I QUIT FOR ALL TIME…. And I’d bunker up all white-knuckled and stay straight. And count the days. I was proud of each day I stayed off…. I’d add them up. Line them up end to end. You know? … And soon it would get…improbable. And the rest of the year, looking ahead, hundreds and hundreds…Who could do it? How did I ever think anyone could do it that way?’ (859)

5 A fictional edition that combines James’s Gifford Lectures and Principles of Psychology appears earlier in the novel’s narrative. (Its owner, the character Randy Lenz, has hollowed out its midsection to use as a cocaine stash.)

147

When compared with The Broom of the System, Infinite Jest is marked by a radical shift of emphasis: rather than focusing on the philosophical problem of solipsism, or of Wittgenstein’s

“meaning as use” or poststructuralist conceptions of “self and other” (as Wallace understood it) in American culture, Wallace instead focuses on alleviating loneliness and “illuminating the possibilities for being alive and human” in a “grotesquely materialistic” American culture

(McCaffery 26-27). As Wallace told an interviewer: “Look man, we’d probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is? In dark times, the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of what’s human and magical that still live and glow despite the times’ darkness.” (Burn 26).

Infinite Jest represents Wallace’s attempt at a solution to the philosophical problem of

Wittgensteinian solipsism and its fictional and cultural counterpart, the problem of sincerity in a cynical America: “We all suffer alone in the real world; true empathy’s impossible. But if a piece of fiction can allow us imaginatively to identify with characters’ pain, we might then also more easily conceive of others identifying with our own. This is nourishing, redemptive; we become less alone inside. It might just be that simple” (McCaffery 22). Ultimately, it was Wallace’s entry into recovery that allowed his writing to progress into an ethical dimension marked by a focus on forging connections with readers. Wallace’s mature, recovery-inspired fiction, in D.T. Max’s phrasing, “h[olds] out a hope rarely signaled in Wallace’s earlier work but dear to his recovery experiences: the possibility that telling a story can heal” (Max 193). Recovery had changed not only the way Wallace wrote, it had fundamentally altered the reason he continued to write anything at all.

148

Westward the Course of Wallace Takes His Way

After the book tour for Infinite Jest was over, Wallace felt relieved to return to Normal.

Back home, he resumed his regular AA meeting schedule at St. Matthews. The book tour’s hectic travel schedule had made finding meetings difficult, and Wallace needed the regularity that meetings provided. His attendance kept him accountable; without the support of his recovery group, Wallace knew his sobriety could be in jeopardy. In isolation, Wallace’s particular cast of mind—his “tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract thinking,” as he characterized it—was capable of rationalizing his substance abuse (Water 48). But recovery had become more important to Wallace beyond staying clean. It was now a central feature of his life, both a lens that colored how he saw the world, and a part of who he was: an addict. Grateful for his sobriety and what it had enabled him to do with his writing, Wallace’s adherence to Big Book edicts like the importance of routine and “one day at a time” was stiffly doctrinaire because he credited the program with “not just his literary development but his actual physical survival”

(Max 237). Wallace felt he owed his sobriety to Alcoholics Anonymous and its 12-step program of recovery, which had made possible both the development of his mature writing ethic and the creation of its fictional vehicle, Infinite Jest—his greatest personal and literary achievement. In short, he identified.

But as Infinite Jest’s publication receded further into the past, Wallace began to realize that the security Normal provided came with its own hidden cost: complacency. Back in familiar surroundings, he found it easy to put off working. Wallace wrote to Don DeLillo during this period that he was “frustrated not just with the slowness of my work but with the erratic pace I work at,” and solicited advice from the senior author, assuring him that “any words or tips would be appreciated and kept in confidence” (Max 235-6). Though he was occasionally producing

149

shorter fiction pieces around this time, Wallace was growing anxious that he hadn’t begun work on anything that could serve as a follow-up to Infinite Jest.

In addition to the paralyzing anxiety of producing a novel that could surpass his last one,

Wallace also seems to have been actively procrastinating by indulging the few of his remaining addictive behaviors that were not expressly forbidden by his 12-step recovery. After Kymberly

Harris’s departure from Illinois, Wallace again started having casual sex with strangers as he’d done during the height of his Boston hedonism with Mark Costello. Wallace was briefly involved with a number of ISU students—both graduate and undergraduate. Even his AA meetings were fair game, despite repeated warnings from other members of the group against his predatory “13th-stepping”—when a more experienced AA pursues sexual involvement with newly sober and often emotionally-fragile members. (Max 232-234).

After the short book tour for Wallace’s 1999 collection of fiction, Brief Interviews with

Hideous Men, which stories he had been composing since the end of the Infinite Jest tour,

Wallace began to lose his taste for this reckless behavior—in part because the composition process for Brief Interviews had made him fully aware how much of himself went into its

“hideous men.” Wallace was also getting older, a point driven home by the fact that his younger sister Amy had just given birth to her first child. Looking for stability, Wallace got a family from his recovery group, the Poags, to set him up with a woman named Juliana Harms, and Wallace’s personal affairs seemed to stabilize for a time. After a few months, Harms moved into Wallace’s house. A social worker, she helped check Wallace’s self-destructive behaviors, though Harms may have overstepped when she suggested he check himself into a treatment facility in

Pennsylvania to kick his nicotine habit. He returned when the program ended more than a week later “highly agitated” and more anxious than ever about his lack of progress on his next big

150

fiction project (Max 251). He again briefly considered going off his Nardil prescription to see if it was causing his writer’s block, but the idea abated when Wallace started smoking again shortly after he got home. But not long after his return from Pennsylvania, Harms began to suspect that

Wallace was being unfaithful, and when she confronted Wallace, he confessed to a relationship with a graduate student, and Harms ended their relationship.

For the remainder of Wallace’s life, he published only short fiction or non-fiction essays— mostly for magazines—with the exception of a book on mathematics that he agreed to write for the Atlas Books series “Great Discoveries,” titled Everything and More: A Compact

History of Infinity. The book warrants mentioning here because it is emblematic of the level of procrastination Wallace was capable of, especially considering the additional danger Wallace knew the book’s subject matter would entail: indulging his abstract, theory-prone mind at the cost of working on his next novel.

Wallace’s anxiety over what he had begun calling “the long thing” ultimately kept him from publishing another novel after Infinite Jest. But Wallace was a productive procrastinator, submitting a draft of Everything and More by the beginning of 2002, though it wouldn’t see publication until 2003. By then, Wallace had moved to California, having accepted a position at

Pomona College. And though Wallace published with increasing frequency after he left Illinois,

Charles Harris6 notes that Wallace had already completed the bulk of all his future work while still at ISU:

David’s decade at Illinois State University was his most productive.… During this prolific period, Wallace also wrote many of the stories and essays later collected in Oblivion (2004) and Consider the Lobster (2006), respectively, and he began his final novel, The Pale King, auditing advanced tax courses from ISU’s Accounting Department[.] (170-171)

6 (who, as former head of English at ISU, was responsible for hiring Wallace)

151

Compounding Wallace’s anxiety about writing a follow-up novel to surpass what he’d already achieved was that Infinite Jest itself had inspired a crop of new novelists. Though none of their work yet approached its level of success, by the end of Wallace’s time at ISU, a host of new writers—Jonathan Franzen, Donald Antrim, Zadie Smith, Jeffrey Eugenides, Rick Moody,

Richard Powers, and Jonathan Safran Foer—had published novels similar enough in voice or style that their work started drawing comparisons to Infinite Jest. And as their number grew,

Wallace felt the originality and importance of his own work diminish. Each year that passed without another Wallace novel increased the likelihood his work would be eclipsed by writers whose narrative aesthetic borrowed heavily from his original.

As Wallace struggled to write his next novel without the stylistic tics that others had begun to imitate, he continued to pare down the last of what he felt were his writing’s gimmicks.

In 2004, Wallace assembled out of these efforts what would be his last collection of short fiction, titled Oblivion. Max characterizes it as a work pervaded by a “studied and mature sadness,” its

“pitiless” stories written in “trick-free prose” that feature “Pynchon-free plots,” and an

“insistence that the reader work for his or her satisfaction” (280). And like his last collection,

Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, Oblivion seems for the most part content to simply hold a mirror up to a bleak world populated by a damaged and hopeless cross-section of humanity without offering them any way out. During this period, when Wallace was unable to start working on his next novel, these shorter pieces allowed him to procrastinate not just because of their length, but because he didn’t hold himself to the same ethical standards in his short fiction as he did in his novels, rationalizing that short fiction couldn’t pull off moral prescription without sounding preachy or hackneyed.

152

In the summer of 2002, Accompanied by his two dogs, Werner and Jeeves, Wallace left

Illinois and drove west to Claremont, California, finally arriving at the house Pomona College had arranged for him after six days on the road. In many ways, Wallace would flourish at

Pomona. Part of what had motivated him to accept the creative writing chair offered by

Pomona’s head of English, Rena Fraden, was the desire to snap his self-destructive streak of relationships. But Wallace also thought the radical change of venue might help spur progress on his next novel. Perhaps the best explanation was the one he gave to a departmental colleague at

ISU, Curtis White: that it was simply “time to grow up” (Max 267).

One of the two visitors Wallace had during his first week in his new Claremont house was Karen Green, a visual artist who Wallace had given previously given permission to adapt his story “The Depressed Person” into a piece of visual art. Wallace consented, even though Green’s version of the story was rewritten to conclude with a happy ending. Green and Wallace must have hit it off when she came by to deliver the piece to him—they started dating soon after

Green’s marriage ended in November of 2002, and when she invited him to spend Christmas with her in Hawaii, Wallace—in a move uncharacteristic of someone who hated travel and had a debilitating fear of sharks—accepted. Before they came back, Wallace asked Green to marry him, but Green demurred. In December of 2004, a little over two years into their relationship, they flew to Urbana and were married with Wallace’s family in attendance. Wallace had bought a house in Claremont earlier in the fall, and Green moved in the following June. Having his personal life in relative order made Wallace feel he was making good on finally growing up, and those who knew him best—his sister, Amy; Jonathan Franzen; Mark Costello—all have similar recollections of Wallace’s years with Green in California as being the happiest they’d seen him.

Wallace was now confidently sober; he and Green even kept wine in the house for guests (Max

153

283). But Wallace remained stalled on his novel project, and decided that he was finally stable enough to take drastic action to resolve his final lingering source of anxiety. Wallace had long suspected that his medication might be what was impeding progress on “the long thing,” and now Wallace felt good enough that with Green’s blessing and promise of support, he decided, once again, to stop taking Nardil.

Hard-line, fundamentalist interpretations of what constitutes sobriety—e.g. that antidepressants are to be considered “substances” and their daily use an addiction—are specifically discouraged7 in the official literature of Alcoholics Anonymous (“Medications 6”).

Nevertheless, fundamentalist interpretations appealed to the purist in Wallace and seemed consistent with the all-or-nothing maintenance of his sobriety. It was, after all, what had saved his life—and the only way he knew how to stay sober. But when Wallace consulted physicians about his Nardil cessation, they convinced him to try tapering off the Nardil first, then as the effects wore off, begin a controlled introduction of a later-generation antidepressant. The doctors suggested that after the new drug had time to work, if Wallace still felt he could go without medication, it would be an option.

Wallace’s physicians didn’t anticipate the scenario that unfolded when the new antidepressants failed to prevent the onset of Wallace’s post-Nardil depression. In the months that followed, Wallace tried several new drugs and ultimately several courses of electroconvulsive therapy in an attempt to overcome his new depression, none of which proved equal to the task. In June of 2008, Wallace was hospitalized twice following unsuccessful suicide

7 The AA pamphlet is quite clear on this point: “Just as it is wrong to enable or support any alcoholic to become re- addicted to any drug, it’s equally wrong to deprive any alcoholic of medication, which can alleviate or control other disabling physical and/or emotional problems.”

154

attempts. And on September 12th, while Green was out running an errand, Wallace walked outside to his back patio, stood up on a chair, and hanged himself.

The biographical details of David Foster Wallace’s life and his novels seem to me inextricable from one another. While it is unreasonable to claim that the struggle to write The

Pale King killed Wallace, one can reasonably assert that the difficulty he had with his unfinished novel was a factor in his decision to go off Nardil. Regarding the connection between the difficulty of writing a follow-up to Infinite Jest and Wallace’s suicide, Max quotes Green directly, saying that Wallace floated the idea of trying another antidepressant because “the person who would go off the medications that were possibly keeping him alive was not the person he liked,” and that “he didn’t want to care about the writing as much as he did” (Max

297).

Wallace’s novels are a record of his developing ethical concerns and his increasing concern for his audience. Yet they are remarkable in their thematic consistency: each is fundamentally concerned with the same set of recurring themes: solipsism, language, choice, and the fundamental question of what it means to be alive and awake in contemporary America.

Wallace understood the novel as the only form of fiction capable of “fulfilling his compact with readers” that he’d originated in “E Unibus Pluram” when he called for writing by “the next real literary rebels” who would “eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue” and instead choose to endorse “single-entendre principles.” For Wallace, “the novel was the big form, the one that mattered, that reviewers and other authors cared about and by which he could fulfill his compact with readers,” through honest empathic concern for readers and the alleviation of human loneliness. (Max 237). It was the only standard by which Wallace ultimately measured his

155

fiction’s success and the only place where he allowed himself to elevate ethical and moral concerns over formal or theoretical ones.

In a 1993 interview for Whiskey River Magazine, Hugh Kennedy asks Wallace flatly,

“What would you like your writing to do?” And in a rare instance of brevity, Wallace replies, “I think all good writing somehow addresses the concern of and acts as an anodyne against loneliness. We’re all terribly, terribly lonely. And there’s a way, at least in prose fiction, that can allow you to be intimate with the world and with a mind and with characters that you just can’t be in the real world.… I think what I would like my stuff to do is make people less lonely”

(“Looking” 53).

For a time, David Foster Wallace dealt with this fear of loneliness by busying himself with the complex puzzles of philosophy, postmodern fiction, and poststructuralist theory.

Recovery helped him see that these pursuits were distractions that merely delayed an inevitable head-on confrontation with loneliness. Infinite Jest is Wallace’s attempt to not only fully countenance that loneliness in himself, but to help alleviate that loneliness in others. By offering up his own experience and the recovery community that had saved his life, Wallace forged a new fiction that was not only innovative but mature and humane. But in his attempt to universalize his diagnosis onto the larger culture, Wallace took on too much. Though Infinite Jest was ultimately successful at solving those problems he’d been avoiding with metafiction, no work of fiction could solve the larger problem he sought to address.

156

Figure 4-1. Photograph of David Foster Wallace’s AA Meeting Notes, page 1.

157

Figure 4-2. Photograph of David Foster Wallace’s AA Meeting Notes, page 2.

158

CHAPTER 5 AFTERWORD: DAVID FOSTER WALLACE’S TRANSFORMATIVE GIFTS AND THE LABOR OF GRATITUDE

Youth ends when egotism does; maturity begins when one lives for others.

—Hermann Hesse Gertrude

Labors of Gratitude, Gift Economies, and Wallace Communities

Intended as a coda to my larger project, this afterword opens by examining Lewis Hyde’s theorization of what he calls “gift economies” and their currency, expressed as “labors of gratitude” (40-57). I then consider how the last phase of Wallace’s 12-step substance-abuse and theory recovery informs his most widely-read piece, the commencement address he gave to the graduating class of 2005 at Kenyon College, which “labor of gratitude” I regard as the most concentrated distillation of the mature writing ethic Wallace had honed in Infinite Jest. Finally, I use Hyde’s concepts to frame my discussion of both on- and offline Wallace communities and to discuss the tensions between the gift economies of Wallace communities and the prestige economies of the traditional academy.

Lewis Hyde and The Gift Economy

Before delving into Hyde’s text The Gift: How the Creative Spirit Transforms the World, in which he defines his conception of “gift economies,” I should first acknowledge a connection between Wallace and Hyde. In the obligatory “Praise for” section of The Gift’s opening pages, we find an enthusiastic recommendation of Hyde’s text from Wallace himself:

The Gift actually deserves the hyperbolic praise that in most blurbs is so empty. It is the sort of book that you remember where you were and even what you were wearing when you first picked it up. The sort that you hector friends about until they read it too. This is not just formulaic blurbspeak; it is the truth. No one who is invested in any kind of art, in questions of what real art does and doesn’t have to do with money, spirituality, ego, love, ugliness, sales, politics, morality, marketing, and whatever you call ‘value,’ can read The Gift and remain unchanged.

159

Wallace’s copy of The Gift—now housed at UT Austin’s Harry Ransom Center—contains his many annotations (see fig. 5-1).

Hyde—who had spent several years counseling alcoholics in a hospital detoxification ward—presents the recovery program of Alcoholics Anonymous as a prime example of a

“transformative gift,” one which must be offered without any expectation of return. In a footnote on page 74 (2006 ed.), Hyde reasons that for alcoholics, AA’s “gift” is a function of the program’s spiritual requirement—the belief in a “higher power”:

Alcoholics who get sober in AA tend to become very attached to the group, at least to begin with. Their involvement seems, in part, a consequence of the fact that AA’s program is a gift. In the case of alcoholism, the attachment may be a necessary part of the healing process. Alcoholism is an affliction whose relief seems to require that the sufferer be bound up in something larger than the ego-of- one (in a “higher power,” be it only the power of the group). Healings that call for differentiation, on the other hand, may be more aptly delivered through the market. (74 fn)

Hyde describes here a sort of hermeneutics of recovery: the only membership requirement of

Alcoholics Anonymous is “a desire to stop drinking,” which desire almost nobody truly has without hitting bottom. Time and again, AA’s official literature seems to go out of its way to remind newcomers that it is only in the depths of such a low that most alcoholics are willing to submit to the rigors of the program.

This receptiveness in the early days of AA’s program of recovery is doubly important because the next step after an honest and sincere desire to quit drinking is often the most difficult: the surrendering of will to a higher power. And here again, this may explain the pains taken by AA’s literature when it emphasizes over and over that this higher power can take whatever form a member chooses. In Infinite Jest, Wallace talks about this kind of hardcore receptiveness as the only real prerequisite for recovery:

The bitch of the thing is that you have to want to. If you don’t want to do as you’re told—I mean as it’s suggested you do—it means that your own personal will is still

160

in control[.] The will you call your own ceased to be yours as of who knows how many Substance-drenched years ago.… This is why most people will Come In and Hang In only after their own entangled will has just about killed them.… You have to want to take the suggestions, want to abide by the traditions of anonymity, humility, surrender to the Group conscience. If you don’t obey, nobody will kick you out. They won’t have to. You’ll end up kicking yourself out, if you steer by your own sick will. (357)

And in an extraordinarily convenient coincidence in terms of my present argument, Hyde chooses AA as his example to explain the circular nature of transformational gifts:

[M]ost artists are converted to art by art itself. The future artist finds himself or herself moved by a work of art, and, through that experience, comes to labor in the service of art until he can profess his own gifts. Those of us who do not become artists nonetheless attend to art in a similar spirit. We come to painting, to poetry, to the stage, hoping to revive the soul. And any artist whose work touches us earns our gratitude.… [F]or it is when art acts as an agent of transformation that we may correctly speak of it as a gift. A lively culture will have transformative gifts as a general feature – it will have groups like AA which address specific problems, it will have methods of passing knowledge from old to young, it will have spiritual teachings available at all levels of maturation and for the birth of the spiritual self. (48)

To restate this passage for my purposes here: The best art is transformative for author and reader alike. Whether one is the giver or receiver of transformational art is merely a function of one’s position in the cycle. The transformational gift is passed freely from giver to recipient, who, transformed by gratitude, feels a duty to pass the gift on to the next recipient. This last step is the same gratitude-inspired service that AA’s fifth tradition and twelfth step refer to: the transformational gift of AA, received by those able to “hang in there” and “keep coming back,” is that (as yet another AA maxim goes) “it works if you work it.”

And this is where recovery’s hermeneutic process cycles back into itself: working the twelfth step is the point at which the recipient, no longer a newcomer—having been transformed by AA’s gift—can assume the role of the giver by sponsoring new members. AA’s gift appears in several places throughout Infinite Jest. Wallace’s Boston AA members understand “giving it away” in a rather transactional sense, though not one that diminishes the effects of the gift:

161

Giving It Away is a cardinal Boston AA principle. The term’s derived from an epigrammatic description of recovery in Boston AA: ‘You give it up to get it back to give it away.’ Sobriety in Boston is regarded as less a gift than a sort of cosmic loan. You can’t pay the loan back, but you can pay it forward, by spreading the message that despite all appearances AA works, spreading this message to the next new guy who’s tottered in to a meeting and is sitting in the back row unable to hold his cup of coffee. (344)

Reading this passage from Infinite Jest against Hyde’s description of the reciprocal relationship between gifts and gratitude, several parallels become apparent:

In each example I have offered of a transformative gift, if the teaching begins to “take,” the recipient feels gratitude. I would like to speak of gratitude as a labor undertaken by the soul to effect the transformation after a gift has been received. Between the time a gift comes to us and the time we pass it along, we suffer gratitude. Moreover, with gifts that are agents of change, it is only when we have come up to its level, as it were, that we can give it away again. Passing the gift along is the act of gratitude that finishes the labor. The transformation is not accomplished until we have the power to give the gift on our own terms. Therefore, the end of the labor of gratitude is similarity with the gift or with its donor. Once this similarity has been achieved we may feel a lingering and generalized gratitude, but we won’t feel it with the urgency of true indebtedness. (48)

Profound examples of this labor of gratitude within AA communities are frequent. That AA members “suffer gratitude” in response to such an immense and personally meaningful gift is visible on the flyleaves of the UF library’s lending copies of AA literature (see fig. 5-2). In Trysh

Travis’s The Language of the Heart, she notes that “The foundational opposition between the logic of AA’s gift economy and that of the mainstream is encapsulated in the AA slogan explaining the role 12th step work plays in sobriety maintenance: ‘You have to give it away in order to keep it’” (92). In the previous figure’s inscriptions by Curtis, Robert, Terry, and Rich— some of which even break anonymity by supplying their last names—we see “the ability to give the gift,” which Travis goes on to say “is the marker of true sobriety[.] The sober AA is only sober because another alcoholic gave him the gift at an earlier time” (92).

Hyde describes the gift-recipient’s “transformation” as one that produces a “similarity with the gift or with its donor.” As I re-read the AA sections of Infinite Jest, I cannot

162

understand Wallace’s use of the word “identification” to mean anything other than this process of “achieving similarity.” In these sections of the novel, Wallace manages to show us precisely the part of recovery that Boston AA’s newcomers can’t see—even though the gift’s transformation is already underway.

Wallace’s Kenyon Commencement as Labor of Gratitude

Considered as a stand-alone piece, Wallace’s commencement address to Kenyon

College’s graduating class of 2005 amounts to the clearest and most distilled example of his mature writing ethic. Written in the first person, the commencement opens with an anecdote:

“There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, and he nods at them and says ‘Morning, boys. How’s the water?’ And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes: ‘What the hell is water?’” (0:50-1:08). As Wallace goes on to explain, “I am not the wise old fish. The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about” (1:15-1:23). These important realities, Wallace says, are most often expressed as clichés, and as the commencement speech continues, it becomes apparent that the cliché that Wallace intends to address with his commencement speech is that “the value of your liberal arts education” lies in “teaching you how to think” (2:25). This cliché about how to think, Wallace argues, hides a deeper, more important reality:

Twenty years after my own education, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal-arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea. 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 existence. Because 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.” This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that

163

most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger. And I submit that this is what the real, no-bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable, adult life dead. Unconscious. A slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone, day in and day out. (8:38-10:10)

Wallace explains that operating unconsciously in this sort of death-in-life existence is our

“default setting,” but that left unchecked, living this way amounts to “an imprisonment so total that the prisoner doesn’t even know he’s locked up” (5:50-5:52). But as an example of Wallace’s mature ethic, the commencement address does not merely describe a problem, it needs to present a solution, to point towards a way out of the problem. The solution, Wallace explains, lies in realizing that we have the freedom to choose what we worship.

Around the 22-minute mark of the November 5, 2016, episode of Matt Bucher and Dave

Laird’s Podcast, “The Great Concavity,” which focuses on Wallace and his work, the conversation turns to Wallace’s Kenyon College commencement address. At this point in the podcast, the hosts are discussing the section of the speech where Wallace talks specifically about the things it’s OK for us to worship and derive our sense of meaning. Drawing a distinction,

Bucher notes:

He [Wallace] says something about if you worship money and things, if that’s where you get, you know, your meaning out of life, you’ll never have enough. If you worship this other thing—if you worship beauty and sexual allure, you’ll always feel ugly, you’ll die a million deaths. All that stuff is him saying: “Don’t worship anything except a higher being.” And that’s really where I think me and Wallace personally, like as a philosophy, part ways in that I disagree with that. And I think that that’s not the definition of “atheism”—because he says: “in the day-today trenches of adult life there’s no such thing as atheism,” and he says: “everyone worships.” And I say worshipping is different than a belief in a higher power…. You can tap real meaning in life from something that is not centered out of a higher power. And he says: “no, it has to be,” and for me that’s a little bit different.

Bucher’s distinction is interesting to me in a couple of ways. First, this part of the commencement speech has always bothered me for what sounds like the same reasons Bucher

164

cites. Though my grandfather was a Methodist minister and I grew up going to church, I do not consider myself to be a religious person—at least not in the dogmatic or doctrinal senses that

“religious” generally connotes. Wallace’s restriction of the acceptable places for me to “tap real meaning” to a list of outmoded spiritual traditions has always seemed odd. This is the relevant sentence from Wallace’s address: “The compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship—be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh, 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.”

What is the commonality between the items on this list that keep them from eating us alive? Do these traditions share some particular quality that keeps them from ultimately bending back inward, toward the self, that keeps them from cultivating in us the selfish desire to accumulate and display the things that Wallace names: money, beauty, power, intellectual mastery? Why this particular list? The answer has everything to do with Wallace’s phrasing. His wording here provides a clue, I think, to his source material.

Wallace’s commencement-address phrasing—“God or spiritual-type thing”—and the plurality of choices in his list of religious traditions has a familiar ring to it. The particular resonance I hear occurs in the Big Book chapter titled “We Agnostics.” In the chapters that lead up to it, alcoholism is presented as a self-inflicted problem, with the self here understood as a tripartite construction comprised of the “mind,” “body,” and—crucially—the “spirit” of the alcoholic. This spiritual side of the self is basically the human capacity for numinous or spiritual experience—something like the feeling of being moved emotionally by the sublime.

The Big Book presents it as an explanation for the preponderance of religions in so many disparate cultures, for the “persistence of the myth”—whether it be true or not. But most

165

importantly, they see this innate spiritual capacity as something that is exceptionally and singularly human. In “We Agnostics,” AA’s Big Book elaborates on how this third component, the alcoholic’s spiritual or metaphysical aspect, must be reformed.

In it, we read that as agnostics, some of the first members of AA had difficulty following the second step. This amounts to a fairly big problem for someone in AA because the rest of the

12 steps hang on the acceptance of the first two: “1. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable” and “2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity” (79). Now, writing as former agnostics who had been able to overcome their skepticism, the authors are “at pains to tell why we think our present faith is reasonable, why we think it more sane and logical to believe than not to believe, why we say our former thinking was soft and mushy when we threw up our hands in doubt and said ‘We don’t know’” (53). When the agnostics looked closely at what held them back from being

“restored to sanity” through belief in a “Power greater than [them]selves,” (59) they found it was another belief—a belief in their own ability to reason, or a faith in their reasonable faculties:

…let us think a little more closely. Without knowing it, had we not been brought to where we stood by a certain kind of faith? For did we not believe in our own reasoning? Did we not have confidence in our ability to think? What was that but a sort of faith? Yes, we had been faithful, abjectly faithful to the God of Reason. So, in one way or another, we discovered that faith had been involved all the time! (53- 54)

Now, with regard to the “particular resonance” I mentioned hearing above, this next bit is where the bells started going off:

We found, too, that we had been worshippers.… Had we not variously worshipped people, sentiment, things, money, and ourselves? … Who of us had not loved something or somebody? How much did these feelings, these loves, these worships, have to do with pure reason? Little or nothing, we saw at last. Were not these things the tissue out of which our lives were constructed? Did not these feelings, after all, determine the course of our existence? It was impossible to say we had no capacity for faith, or love, or worship. In one form or another we had been living by faith and little else. (54, my emphasis)

166

The authors go on to explain that the matter of their conversion was no small thing; if they had not been primed to accept the necessity of handing over their wills to a higher power, they probably wouldn’t have been able to do it—save that they had recently experienced a particular event in the narrative common to all addicts: hitting bottom. And at the point in David Foster

Wallace’s life when the Big Book crosses his path, hitting bottom is precisely where he found himself.

Ultimately, the items on Wallace’s approved worship-list in the Kenyon address are there because they’re traditions that direct us toward a love of something outside of ourselves as their primary principles—Christianity’s first two commandments, for example, are to “Love God with the entirety of the heart, intellect, and will,” and that basically, if the first commandment is properly understood and followed, that one cannot help but follow the second: “love others as yourself.” The spiritual traditions that make up Wallace’s list are variations on that same theme—something like Augustine’s “Love, then do what thou wilt.”

On February 1, 2016, Tom Bissell published a piece in The New York Times, which is an excerpt from his introduction to the recently-published twentieth-anniversary edition of

Wallace’s own big book. Bissell writes: “While I have never been able to get a handle on

Wallace’s notion of spirituality, I think it is a mistake to view him as anything other than a religious writer. His religion, like many, was a religion of language.” I agree with Bissell that to understand Wallace (at least post-Jest Wallace) as anything other than a religious writer is a mistake—but only with the caveat that “religious” here means something very specific and non- doctrinaire. However, I am confused by Bissell’s confession of difficulty with “getting a handle” on Wallace’s spirituality. Maybe this is some sort of rhetorical strategy on Bissell’s part; perhaps

167

the introduction to an 1,100-page novel isn’t the place to launch into a paean to Alcoholics

Anonymous.

But if he truly means what he says—that he cannot “get a handle on Wallace’s notion of spirituality”—he must not have looked very hard. Wallace mentions spirituality and religion in numerous places, from interviews with Brian Garner and Larry McCaffery, to the Kenyon speech, to nonfiction essays like “The Nature of the Fun,” to Infinite Jest itself. What’s more, Wallace is reasonably consistent about what he says. This consistency, I would argue, stems from Wallace’s fidelity to (what I understand as) the source of his first serious engagements with religion: his participation in AA.

But in typical Wallace fashion, he couldn’t just take what AA said about spirituality on faith; he had to do his own research. At least one of the texts Wallace consulted for this research was Huston Smith’s The World’s Religions: Our Great Wisdom Traditions (which by the time

Wallace read it had been re-issued and re-titled; it was originally published as The Religions of

Man).

Fig. 5-3 shows the cover of the 1991 edition of the Smith text (like the one owned and annotated by Wallace, which copy is available for viewing at UT’s Harry Ransom Center) and of the image reproduced on it in another context. The cover image is a reproduction of a Norman

Rockwell’s “Golden Rule,” a piece that first appeared on the cover of The Saturday Evening Post in 1961. (A mosaic version of the Rockwell piece still hangs in the United Nations building in

New York.) The text that sits on top of the image, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” is there in the original—as in Rockwell put it there.

I mention this here because I think it goes a long way toward helping us “get a handle on

Wallace’s notion of spirituality.” Fig. 5-4 contains a photograph of a page of Wallace’s

168

annotations in the Smith text. The following is a transcription with Wallace’s underlining for clarity’s sake:

Might not becoming a part of a larger, more significant whole relieve life of its triviality? That question announces the birth of religion. For though in some watered-down sense there may be a religion of self-worship, true religion begins with the quest for meaning and value beyond self-centeredness. It renounces the ego’s claims to finality.

But what is this renunciation for? The question brings us to the two signposts on the Path of Renunciation. The first of these reads “the community,” as the obvious candidate for something greater than ourselves. In supporting at once our own life and the lives others, the community has an importance no single life can command. Let us, then, transfer our allegiance to it, giving its claims priority over our own.

This transfer marks the first great step in religion. It produces the religion of duty, after pleasure and success the third great aim of life in the Hindu outlook. Its power over the mature is tremendous. Myriads have transformed the will-to-get into the will-to-give, the will-to-win into the will-to-serve. Not to triumph but to do their best—to acquit themselves responsibly, whatever the task at hand—has become their prime objective.

In the margin next to this underlining is Wallace’s note: “AA.”

I do not mean here to equate the underscoring of a passage with its unequivocal or uncritical endorsement. But neither do I think it a stretch to say that Wallace had read the AA literature closely enough to see in this passage from Smith the core principles of “spirituality” as they’re presented by Alcoholics Anonymous: the twin necessities of self-renunciation via the relinquishment of the will to a power greater than oneself, and the consequent undertaking of work in service of others. As the Big Book (cribbing KJV’s James 2) cautions: “faith without works is dead.”

One of the things that allowed Wallace to suspend his disbelief about the AA-mandated belief in “a power greater than himself” was the way the Big Book conceptualizes the notions of

“meaning” and “use” as intrinsically bound up with one another. In the AA model,

Wittgenstein’s aphorism is applied not only to language, but to the rather more immediate case

169

of the recovering alcoholic struggling to cope with life after alcohol. In this context, asking “What is the meaning of life?” is to ask “What is the use of my life?” or “Am I useful to others”?

This notion of “usefulness” and its relation to the “default-mode” of self-centeredness

Wallace talks about in the commencement is one that crops up again and again in AA’s Big

Book: “Never was I to pray for myself, except as my requests bore on my usefulness to others.

Then only might I expect to receive…. Simple, but not easy; a price had to be paid. It meant the destruction of self-centeredness” (13–14, my emphasis). In fact, the concept of service work—

“passing it on,” as it is codified in one AA maxim—is directly and repeatedly correlated with the chances of a successful recovery:

For if an alcoholic failed to perfect and enlarge his spiritual life through work and self-sacrifice for others, he could not survive the certain trials and low spots ahead. If he did not work, he would surely drink again, and if he drank he would surely die. Then faith would be dead indeed. With us it is just like that…. Faith has to work twenty-four hours a day in and through us, or we perish (14–16); Our very lives, as ex-problem drinkers, depend upon our constant thought of others and how we may help meet their needs (20); Whatever our protestations, are not most of us concerned with ourselves, our resentments, or our self-pity? Selfishness— self-centeredness! That, we think, is the door of our troubles…. So our troubles, we think, are basically of our own making. They arise out of ourselves, and the alcoholic is an extreme example of self-will run riot, though he usually doesn’t think so. Above everything, we alcoholics must be rid of this selfishness. We must, or it kills us! (Alcoholics Anonymous 62, my emphasis).

Ultimately, the mere cessation of drinking is presented as not finally the point; it is rather a means to another rehabilitation—it is a restoration of the capacity for service: “At the moment we are trying to put our lives in order. But this is not an end in itself. Our real purpose is to fit ourselves to be of maximum service to God and the people about us” (77, my emphasis). I am inclined to read all of Wallace’s writing from Infinite Jest on as a function of “working the steps.” And if Wallace was sincere about working them, which I believe he was, this sincerity has a certain bearing on questions that get asked over and over about his work.

170

Labors of Gratitude and Wallace Communities

The Kenyon commencement speech might never have come to light without one

Wallace-community in particular—the internet’s oldest community of Wallace fans (and the first one I participated in)—the David Foster Wallace listserv, or “Wallace-l.”1 This online community of Wallace enthusiasts is nearly as old as Infinite Jest itself, and marked twenty years of continuous operation on April 26th, 2016. The listserv, one of the earliest forms of internet- based mass communication, enables group discussion by taking a single message sent to its address (e.g. “[email protected]”) and relaying a copy of the message to the email address of each of its “subscribers.” Subscribing is generally a matter of sending an email to the listserv’s address with the single word “subscribe” in the subject line.

The genesis of Wallace-l begins on another listserv dedicated to the discussion of

Thomas Pynchon’s work. According to their archives, talk of creating Wallace-l initially began on pynchon-l due to its subscribers’ irritation over the amount of non-Pynchon-related discussion that flooded their list in the wake of Infinite Jest’s publication:

From: MASCARO@[omitted] Date: 19 Mar 1996 17:53 -0800 Subject: curmudgeonly

Since most of my posts seem to be getting clogged in some dead gopher bum, I'm sure no one will read this little note, but I do need to say it.

For the past week or more IJ has been occupying the vast bulk of this list's imaginative meanderings, so why don't one of you just go start a DFW list? Is there one?

john m

1 The Kenyon commencement address was first transcribed and posted to the internet by Wallace-l member Devin Thompson.

171

This conversation thread continued until one of pynchon-l’s administrators, Dan Schmidt, sent out an inaugural message to the subscribers of the newly-created Wallace-l listserv:

From: dfan at lglass.com (Schmidt, Dan) Date: Fri, 26 Apr 1996 12:06:26 -0400 Subject: Wallace-l: Welcome to Wallace-l!

Because I did not get around to writing an info message until a day after I opened the list, none of you have received it yet. So here it is. We already have around twenty people, so if you have something to say, there are people listening.

Dan Schmidt | dfan at lglass.com | http://www2.lglass.com/~dfan

The first conversations on Wallace-l were mostly about Infinite Jest, but there weren’t that many of them: during its first year, entire months sometimes passed without a single message being sent to wallace-l. But since the early days of the list, the traffic has steadily increased and, predictably, has recorded its heaviest periods of traffic when Wallace published new material or after significant Wallace-related developments like the news of his suicide in September of 2008.

As of August 2016, the list has added more than 1,400 subscribers and distributed upwards of

77,000 emails.

Unlike a forum, where members’ post-counts act as a system of capital accumulation

(indeed, some forums display their posters’ “ranks” below their names, which ranks are a function of the number of posts they’ve made to the forum), the email-based format of the

Wallace-l listserv ascribes no authority to any individual member’s contributions. Whereas systems like Facebook and Twitter keep track of content via likes or retweets, recommending popular content to users via personalized notifications, the Wallace-l system itself makes no such endorsements; there is no mechanism in the listserv software to make them. So unlike current- generation social media platforms, the level of the Wallace-l list’s engagement with a topic is solely a function of the list members’ interest in a message’s content.

172

Of the roughly 1,400 current members of Wallace-l, only 79 are subscribed to the list using an email address with a .edu TLD designation. I do not mean to suggest by this ratio that only six percent of all Wallace-l subscribers are professional academics; however, it reveals something about the character of the Wallace-l community that less than six percent of those who participate in list discussions advertise their affiliation with an academic institution via their email addresses. Unlike the experience of studying literature in a university humanities program

—where it is not uncommon to find multiple course offerings per semester devoted to the study not of theory applied to literary texts but to understanding a particular theorist or theoretical texts themselves—on Wallace-l, theory enters the discussion in service of textual explanation.

This unwritten prohibition of theory for its own sake or of theoretical discussions that privilege abstract intellectualizing over an idea’s narrative application or consequences grows organically out of the list’s engagement with Wallace’s texts. The David Foster Wallace I have framed as a recovering theory addict was a writer who by the advent of Wallace-l had instituted a strict pass/fail litmus test governing the use of theory in his own work: to make the cut, they had to perform a narrative function beyond the mere statement of themselves qua theory. It is this mature Wallace that my phrases “recovering theory addict” or “recovering smart aleck” designate, and they are, I believe, apt descriptions of the majority of subscribers who comprise

Wallace-l.

Most new members don’t start threads themselves until they’ve spent time observing the other subscribers’ messages to the list in order to get a feel for the listserv’s tenor, unwritten conventions, and group dynamics. This type of passive participation by the newcomer—like sitting in the back row of an AA meeting—amounts to a sort of eavesdropping. And as with an

AA meeting, to observe without sharing with the group for too long is a discouraged behavior,

173

which is reflected in the listserv’s term for it: “lurking.” Often, a newcomer’s first post to the list begins with a nod to this practice as a way to break the ice. Here’s an example of a recent subscriber’s first post from March 5 of this year:

From: Jameson Randall McBride [email protected] Date: Sat, 5 Mar 2016 13:41:42 -0800 Subject: Re: wallace-l: Jarret Kobek's I Hate the Internet

Longtime collegiate lurker here. I'm reading I Hate the Internet right now & I think that's a little unfair: his narrator takes an (ironically?) polemical attitude against pretty much all U.S. lit, believing that the idea of a "good novel" is a C.I.A. conspiracy, etc.

The tone of the novel attempts to reflect the overblown, angry tone of online content. It's a cool idea, and I think he executes it well.

This practice of acknowledging one’s first contribution serves as a sort of self-deprecating introduction of the newcomer to the group—a practice that recalls the traditional salutation of call-and-response by speakers in the AA tradition (“Hi, I’m Jameson, and I’m an alcoholic”).

Another behavioral parallel between Wallace fan communities and twelve-step groups— one that sets it distinctly apart from the academic community in general—is these groups’ common anticompetitive ethos. David Hering, in the introduction to his 2010 anthology

Consider David Foster Wallace, attributes the willingness of Wallace scholars to share information across academic/non-academic boundaries to Wallace’s writing itself:

Wallace’s ability to create this sense of intense intimacy in his writing is what has garnered him a legion of devoted, obsessed fans. There is a unique quality about his fan base. Wallace’s philosophy and writing style prompt both serious literary criticism and regular human conversation. Quite frequently the online listserv Wallace-l discusses items of personal interest and offers opinions about general topics that have nothing to do with Wallace’s work, not an uncommon practice for internet communities but certainly uncommon for communities devoted to single literary figures that generally stick to more aesthetic topics. There also seems to be more interaction between electronic and academic communities on the subject of Wallace’s work than is standard. (15)

174

This “interaction between electronic and academic communities” is exactly what the recent campaigns for “open access” in academic circles are about: they are attempts to break down the kinds of barriers put in place in order to protect career academics’ (and their publishers’) monetary interests via copyright. The current push to get University faculty to publish their work in open-access journals stands in stark contrast to the usual cutthroat approach, though this is perhaps more pronounced in the sciences than in the humanities. This sort of openness is one that characterizes communities of Wallace scholars. Consider the following snippet of an email response to a lengthy Wallace-l thread from 2011:

From: jtractatus at gmail.com Subject: in a pinch, need some smart help from smart helpers Date: 5 May 2011 20:09 -0800

Hey Jonah,

I'm currently also writing a Thesis on DFW's conception of PPM [post- postmodernism] or "the new thing" we've all speculated about and how this is a fundamentally ethical construct. So I guess we can consider ourselves competitors, but I'd prefer to think of us as colleagues.

This poster, James McAdams, went on to volunteer a lengthy answer to the original poster’s request for help with his thesis, as did over a dozen other Wallace-l members, two of whom,

Maria Bustillos and Adam Kelly, have published numerous print articles on Wallace, and another, Greg Carlisle, published the first monograph-length study of Infinite Jest. I chose this message as a representative example of Wallace-l’s anticompetitive nature for a personal reason—it was this message, which I read shortly after joining the list myself, that finally convinced me to reorient my academic focus and commit to a project on Wallace.

Since then, my project has benefitted in innumerable ways from this type of support beyond my initial experience of the Wallace-l group. I owe an enormous debt to the unusual generosity of several different fan communities, but the greatest personal debt I owe to any one

175

Wallace fan or scholar is unquestionably to Matt Bucher. I first met Matt at the Marriott bar after the initial day of panels at Illinois State University’s first annual Wallace conference in 2014.

Since that conversation, Matt has made available to me over 600 personal photographs of

Wallace’s book-annotations, correspondence, research notes, and draft materials from the holdings of the University of Texas’s Harry Ransom Center archives. As the administrator of the

Wallace-l listserv, (a job he took over from the original administrator, Dan Schmidt, on April 17,

2002), he has also provided me with access to the administrative backend of the software, which has made my own research into the Wallace-l community for this project easier by several orders of magnitude. It was through Matt’s influence that I and the other attendees of the 2015 ISU

Wallace conference screened an advance copy of the recent Wallace biopic The End of the Tour in the theater attached to the conference hotel, after which, on that same screen, the audience participated in an interview with the film’s director, James Ponsoldt. My gratitude for Matt’s generosity with both his research materials and his time cannot be overstated.

So what is it that compels thousands of strangers to organize themselves—both on the internet and in person—for the sole purpose of talking to each other about David Foster

Wallace’s writing? With the possible exception of Thomas Pynchon, I can’t think of another figure in contemporary American literature whose readers generate and engage in so much collaborative work. The amount of scholarship that Wallace fan groups contribute to both professional and independent Wallace studies already represents an enormous body of information, and its scope is now expanding at a rate impossible for a single scholar to keep pace with.

In addition to Wallace-l, consider the following list of projects, all of which charge no access fee (though some require significant financial resources), and all of which have helped

176

shape this project: Nick Maniatis’s thehowlingfantods.com, Matt Bucher & Dave Laird’s podcast, The Great Concavity (which has featured among its guests Wallace biographer D.T.

Max2), multiple international conferences (including Paris & London, the annual conferences at

Illinois State University, and an upcoming one in Australia), and Chris Ayer’s Poor Yorick

Entertainment tumblr, “A Visual Exploration of the Filmography of James O. Incandenza”

(Ayers has designed and donated the logos for all of the ISU conferences, and his art is featured on all of the merchandise sold by ISU to keep the DFW conferences sustainable).

Two final online, group-sourced Wallace projects bear mentioning here in a little more detail because of the sheer number of people who participated in them: the original group read of

Infinite Jest that took place in 2009, “Infinite Summer,” and one of this year’s group reads,

“Infinite Winter.” Participation in Infinite Winter eclipsed the enormous response of the original, with its own 800-member subReddit, 600 Twitter followers, and 200-member Goodreads group, not to mention the multiple weekly posts by the six “guides” that appear on the website, infinitewinter.org and their accompanying comment threads.

When I’ve been lucky enough to make a contribution to projects like these, I’ve always come away from the experience feeling like I’m running on rocket fuel. Collaborative work has the unique ability to remind me why I started writing about Wallace in the first place. Whatever my level of participation, I always get back far more than I put in. But none of these communities would exist without the dedicated people who maintain them and whose involvement far exceeds anything that could reasonably be called “participation.” Given the amount of labor required, what drives those who devote time and energy to their creation and

2 The hosts were for some reason interested in what I’d have to say about Wallace for an hour, the result of which was Episode 16, available here: http://greatconcavity.podbean.com/e/episode-13-discussing-david-foster-wallace- with-rob-short/.

177

maintenance? In an attempt to answer this question, I offer the following account of my own experience.

The only plausible explanation for this kind of dedication to an author’s work I’ve come across is Lewis Hyde’s conception of “gift economies.” Just as writing Infinite Jest was a part of

David Foster Wallace’s recovery, reading the novel has been instrumental in helping others with issues of addiction as well. In The Legacy of David Foster Wallace, Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s

“Infinite Summer: Reading, Empathy, and the Social Network” describes, among many other empathic connections made between readers and Wallace’s long novel, one case in particular:

“Infinite Summer,” a season-long project started by Matthew Baldwin on June 1, 2009. Baldwin structured the project as a combination blog-and-reading-group and set a reading schedule of 75 pages per week and called for other bloggers to join him in reading and discussing Infinite Jest on his site through guest posts and comments.

Fitzpatrick’s piece calls special attention to one participant, who posted under the name

“Infinitedetox,” had a “relationship with ‘pharmaceutical opiates’ that quickly trended from ‘an experiment’ to a ‘recreation’ to clear ‘dependency,’ a relationship that a first encounter with

Infinite Jest helped to change” (194.) Only a month into the project, in a post that began “My name is Infinitedetox and I am an addict,” the poster wrote that “Somehow the book—and now brace yourself for one of those clichés that Wallace seems so interested in in IJ—made me want to be a better person. And it inspired me to stop taking drugs immediately, to Kick the Bird, via a mechanism which I’ve had a hard time articulating.” Infinitedetox describes the process of one that sounds remarkably like McDermott’s line about William James’s education, “He ceded his mind to the thinking of other minds” (11:15). By surrendering his thought to the ideas in

178

Wallace’s text, he “came to care about its concerns as much as its author did, thus laying the groundwork for an empathic engagement with the text” (195).

The poster went on to say that “Wallace’s judgments on addicts and addictions fell upon me with great force, and something about the ferocity of his critique, coupled with his profound compassion and humaneness toward the subject, compelled me to waste absolutely zero time in booting the pills and Getting My Shit Together” (195). We can’t know if the novel was sufficient to change this participant’s behavior enough to stay clean. The veracity of its narrative is one that would certainly strain credulity—if it weren’t for so many other similar accounts.

Fitzpatrick’s essay conducts an examination of the first large-scale group read of Infinite

Jest, organized by Matthew Baldwin in June of 2009. In it, Fitzpatrick wields a veritable Swiss- army knife of literary critical authorities, including appearances by Maurice Blanchot, Dominick

LaCapra, Alison Landsberg, and Robert McLaughlin, but for all the piece’s AA terminology- dropping, Lewis Hyde’s name is conspicuously absent.

Fitzpatrick notes that during the composition of Infinite Jest, “Wallace’s marginalia in

George Gilder’s Life After Television makes clear he was thinking about the relationship between television and what Gilder refers to as the ‘telecomputer,’” a device that roughly approximates today’s internet-enabled devices. But in the margins of this particular section, Wallace—whose prescience about the future of American culture makes Infinite Jest an eerie reading experience even twenty years after its publication—was unable to predict the rise of communities like

Facebook and Twitter: “So where is the community? Everyone stays home, everyone does his own thing” (Fitzpatrick 205 n12). But while the shift from one- to two-way communication that social media enables has certainly increased the number of our online interactions with others, the quality of those conversations is another matter. As an increasing amount of our time is spent

179

online, what seems clear is that the quality of our online interactions with one another pretty much mirrors those that happen offline. The reading group, a community of people whose interactions center on the shared experience of reading a common text, is no different.

The extraordinary nature of online communities that coalesce around Wallace’s work lies precisely in the quality of these online interactions. I agree with Fitzpatrick’s assertion that in the subset of Wallace-related online groups that “those human interconnections…are bound up in the need to understand something about one’s life by engaging with the stories told by others” (198).

Though made anonymously, the public nature of communication in these online communities gives the statements members make in front of the rest of the group something like the force of a commitment. At the very least, these statements enjoy a sort of collective holding- to-account by virtue of their vocalization. This phenomenon—the public airing of personal struggle—was, as Fitzpatrick writes, something that happened during Infinite Summer:

One pseudonymous participant, for instance, published a guest post on the site about a month into the project, beginning “My name is infinitedetox and I am an addict.” The author then told the story of a relationship with “pharmaceutical opiates” that quickly trended from “an experiment” to “a recreation” to clear “dependency,” a relationship that a first encounter with Infinite Jest helped to change. [Infinite Summer] provided infinitedetox with both the impetus for a return to the novel and its perspective, as well as a venue for the kind of safe, anonymous sharing that AA inspires [, and led to] an individual blog detailing both the reading and the recovery process. (194-95)

And though Fitzpatrick is careful to note that “in enacting such a literal form of self-surrender,

Infinitedetox gives the impression of having mistaken a text about the struggle with addiction for the struggle itself,” (195) I hope to have provided here more evidence of the transformational power of a growing number of Wallace communities that argue this user’s experience was not such an anomaly. In her closing, Fitzpatrick further qualifies the work done in service of Infinite

Summer in terms of the gift’s transformative ability:

180

The writing that was produced on an around Infinite Summer wasn’t just shouting into the void, and it wasn’t just the kinds of self-absorbed rambling critics often associate with personal blogs. The public, open nature of the group and the kinds of sharing that it produced reveal the degree to which AA, blogs, and Infinite Jest all represent an opportunity to build empathic relations with others, transforming self- expression into a generous mode of Giving It Away that, like Wallace’s novel, creates the possibility of connection for other readers. (195-96)

David Hering’s aforementioned introduction ends with a similar sentiment, but he adds an overt call to arms: “If our responses to Wallace in our electronic communities can spill out into our classrooms, into more print resources, and into conferences[,] I think we stand a good chance of bringing Wallace’s conversation to a wider readership[.] This community is vital to continuing and expanding the conversations Wallace started with his readers. Let’s keep talking” (23).

Hering’s reminder to Wallace scholars about our common endgame—to get Wallace’s work in front of as many eyes as possible—is also a reminder that while meeting up face to face is an incredibly energizing experience, it is important to harness that energy toward our shared goals once we have returned home and the buzz of the conference wears off.

“Offline” Wallace Communities, Personal Gratitude, and Prestige Economies

As briefly noted in my introduction to Chapter 1, the last half-dozen years have seen a nearly logarithmic spike in the size of the scholarly apparatus that attends Wallace’s writing. My own level of involvement in Wallace-related projects has similarly grown. All of my recent collaborative work, culminating in the formation of the International David Foster Wallace

Society3 and the launch of its print periodical, The Journal of David Foster Wallace Studies, can be traced back to my first Wallace Conference, held at Illinois State University in 2014. My experience there was not only one that validated my decision to study Wallace, but one that provided such emotional and intellectual sustenance that I have attended every subsequent

3 The IDFWS website at http://www.dfwsociety.org serves as the hub for both the Society and the journal.

181

meeting. This yearly trip to Normal has become something of an annual pilgrimage for me; it marks the high point of my year, the event at which I refill my tank with enough fuel to sustain me for another 365 days.

Last year, as the date for the conference approached, Ryan Marnane—a doctoral candidate at the Salve Regina University who teaches at Bryant University and the MIT Office of Engineering Outreach—emailed a group of DFW2015 attendees, myself included. Marnane suggested we pool our grad-student resources and avoid the conference hotel’s inflated rates by renting a large, old, Victorian house near campus through AirBNB, which we did. The atmosphere at the conference that week was unlike anything I’ve experienced at an academic event. The overwhelming collegiality and genuine interest in each other’s’ work led to several late-night collaborative sessions we read and workshopped our presentations like MFA-seminar pieces. The house was a constant hub of activity at nearly all hours. At night, “porch panels” were convened over drinks. It was during one of these sessions that the idea for the Wallace

Society and the Journal were originally conceived.

All of this would be an indulgent recollection if those assembled at the house in Normal had not backed up their talk with action. By the end of January 2017, several Skype-meetings later, we had formally assembled a board of directors for the Society and the journal, drafted a mission statement, retained legal counsel, and opened bank and PayPal business accounts in the

DFW Society’s name. The Society is governed by a board of twelve volunteers whose academic affiliations range from English faculty at Loyola University and University College Dublin to graduate students, high-school teachers, and independent Wallace scholars from Canada to

Australia. My biggest contribution to these projects outside of collaborating on things like our documents of incorporation and mission statement or serving as a reader for the journal was to

182

design and launch our website. Since it went live on January 2, the Society has attracted over 125 members. Their signups have generated over $4,500 during the first month, exceeding our

$4,000 goal to fund the journal’s first print run. On January 19th, Nick Lindsay, the journals director for MIT Press, emailed the president of The Journal of David Foster Wallace Studies,

Tony McMahon—another conference attendee who had stayed at the Normal AirBNB house—to see if the society would be interested in publishing with his organization.

But here, where money enters the discussion, is where the gift economies of these particular Wallace communities enters into tension with the prestige economy of the traditional

American academy. In one of my earlier quotations from Hyde’s The Gift, recall that he writes that gift economies are driven by a concern for something greater than the singular self, that it is necessary for a person who participates in a gift economy “be bound up in something larger than the ego-of-one”—something that emphasizes the sameness or “identification” of its constituent members (74 fn). Hyde contrasts the sameness that the healing, transformative gift of AA emphasizes with the type of recovery that is motivated by financial gain, saying that “Healings that call for differentiation, on the other hand, may be more aptly delivered through the market”

(74 fn). It is this need for “differentiation” that short-circuits the logic of the gift economy, and this focus on individual differentiation is one that Hyde binds inextricably with undertakings that are motivated by primarily financial concerns.

I have seen firsthand the tensions between these two competing economies. When the board of The Journal of David Foster Wallace Studies was first approached by MIT, who had expressed interest in publishing the journal for us, one of the first concerns raised by members of the board was whether or not we would be able to keep to our goal of making the journal’s content available through the mechanisms of open access. In our negotiations with MIT Press,

183

we had been told that any online content would need to be hosted behind the MIT paywall and protected by subscription-based access, save the single article from each issue of the journal we would be allowed to distribute freely on our own website. At this time, the board continues to negotiate with MIT for some kind of compromise—perhaps a time-limit on how long the articles must only exist behind their paywall before being taken to full open access—and the tension between these two economies may ultimately mean that the journal has to sacrifice the name- recognition that would allow it to command higher-quality scholarship for its ecumenical stance regarding open access, a debate that for now remains undecided.

Still: in three years, what began with submitting a (what I thought would surely be rejected) paper proposal to the ISU Wallace conference has propelled me to what is still, for me, an entirely inexplicable situation in which things like “Video-conference with MIT Journal

Director” are actual appointments that exist on my phone’s calendar. In the current market— where finishing a PhD in no way guarantees tenured employment after graduation—I am incredibly grateful for the generosity of time and spirit that I have experienced as a result of my decision to study Wallace. As my defense date approaches, as I look back at those things I helped to bring into the world that will put Wallace’s work in front of others, and the gratitude I feel at having been allowed to be a part of these things affirms the reason I came back to graduate school in the first place. At the end of the day, these connections are what matter most, and they will sustain me.

This project, teaching my own course on David Foster Wallace’s work, the inclusion of his work in the survey classes I taught, and my continued contributions to and participation in various online Wallace groups represent my efforts to answer Hering’s call to put Wallace’s

184

work in front of as many eyes as possible. They are the best ways I have to repay the enormity of

Wallace’s gift.

185

Figure 5-1. Photograph of David Foster Wallace’s annotations in The Gift.

186

A B C Figure 5-2. Series of photographs of annotations. A) Alcoholics Anonymous, front flyleaf. B) Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, front flyleaf. C) Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, front flyleaf.

187

A B

Figure 5-3. Series of photographs of Norman Rockwell’s “Golden Rule” A) Cover of The World’s Religions. B) Cover of The Saturday Evening Post.

188

Figure 5-4. Photograph of David Foster Wallace’s annotations in The World’s Religions.

189

LIST OF REFERENCES

“The A.A. Member—Medications and Other Drugs.” Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, 2011, aa.org/assets/en_US/p-11_aamembersMedDrug.pdf.

Alcoholics Anonymous: The Story of How Many Thousands of Men and Women Have Recovered from Alcoholism. 4th ed., Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, 2001.

Aubry, Timothy. “Selfless Cravings: Addiction and Recovery in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest.” American Fiction of the 1990s: Reflections of History and Culture, edited by Jay Prosser, Routledge, 2008, pp. 206-219.

Bolger, Robert K. “‘A Less “Bullshitty’ Way to Live: The Pragmatic Spirituality of David Foster Wallace.” Gesturing Toward Reality: David Foster Wallace and Philosophy, edited by Robert K. Bolger and Scott Korb, Bloomsbury, 2014, pp. 31-51.

Boswell, Marshall. Understanding David Foster Wallace. U of South Carolina P, 2003.

Burn, Stephen J. David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest: A Reader’s Guide. 2nd ed., Continuum, 2012.

---, editor. Conversations with David Foster Wallace. UP of Mississippi, 2012.

Carlisle, Greg. Elegant Complexity: A Study of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. Sideshow Media Group, 2007.

Cohen, Samuel and Lee Konstantinou, editors. The Legacy of David Foster Wallace. U of Iowa P, 2012.

Evans, David H. “The Chains of Not Choosing: Free Will and Faith in William James and David Foster Wallace.” A Companion to David Foster Wallace Studies, edited by Marshall Boswell and Stephen J. Burn, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, pp. 171-189.

Fitzpatrick, Kathleen. “Infinite Summer: Reading, Empathy, and The Social Network.” The Legacy of David Foster Wallace, edited by Samuel Cohen and Lee Konstantinou, U of Iowa P, 2012, pp.182-207.

Freudenthal, Elizabeth. “Anti-Interiority: Compulsiveness, Objectification, and Identity in Infinite Jest.” New Literary History, vol. 41, no. 1, Winter 2010, pp. 191-211.

Hamilton, Hamish. “Celebrating the Life and Work of David Foster Wallace: 1962–2008.” In Memoriam: David Foster Wallace, special issue of Five Dials, no. 10, 2010. fivedials.com/number-10-in-memoriam-david-foster-wallace.

Harris, Charles B. “David Foster Wallace: ‘That Distinctive Singular Stamp of Himself.’” Critique, vol. 51, no. 2, 2010, pp. 168-176.

190

Henry, Casey Michael. “‘Sudden Awakening to the Fact That the Mischief Is Irretrievably Done’: Epiphanic Structure in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest.” Critique, vol. 56, no. 5, 2015, pp. 480-502.

Hering, David. Consider David Foster Wallace: Critical Essays. Sideshow Media Group, 2010.

Holland, Mary K. “‘The Art’s Heart’s Purpose’: Braving the Narcissistic Loop of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest.” Critique, vol. 47, no. 3, 2006, pp. 218-42.

Hyde, Lewis. The Gift: How the Creative Spirit Transforms the World. Canongate, 2006.

James, Caryn. “Wittgenstein Is Dead and Living in Ohio.” New York Times Book Review, 1 Mar. 1987. nytimes.com/books/97/03/16/reviews/wallace-r-broom.html.

James, William. Pragmatism. Harvard UP, 1975.

---. The Principles of Psychology. Vol. 2, Henry Holt, 1890. 2 vols.

---. The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature. Modern Library, 1994.

Kakutani, Michiko. “Life Distilled From Details, Infinite and Infinitesimal.” New York Times, 1 June 2004. nytimes.com/2004/06/01/books/books-of-the-times-life-distilled-from-details- infinite-and-infinitesimal.html.

Kelly, Adam. “David Foster Wallace and the New Sincerity in American Fiction.” Consider David Foster Wallace: Critical Essays, edited by David Hering, Sideshow Media Group, 2010, pp. 131-146.

---. “David Foster Wallace: The Death of the Author and the Birth of a Discipline.” Irish Journal of American Studies Online, no. 2, 2010. ijas.iaas.ie/index.php/article-david-foster- wallace-the-death-of-the-author-and-the-birth-of-a-discipline.

---. “Development Through Dialogue: David Foster Wallace and the Novel of Ideas.” Studies in the Novel, vol. 44, no. 3, 2012, pp. 265-81.

---. “Dialectic of Sincerity: Lionel Trilling and David Foster Wallace.” Post45, 17 Oct. 2014. post45.research.yale.edu/2014/10/dialectic-of-sincerity-lionel-trilling-and-david-foster- wallace.

Lipsky, David. Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace. Broadway, 2010.

Markson, David. Wittgenstein’s Mistress. Dalkey Archive, 1995.

Max, D. T. "Angels of Death: David Foster Wallace and the Battle against Irony, Letterman and Leyner?" MIT, 11 Mar. 2013. cms.mit.edu/podcasts/colloquia/cms-colloquium-2013-03- 07-max.mp3.

191

---. Every Love Story is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace. Viking-Penguin, 2012.

---. “The Unfinished: David Foster Wallace’s Struggle to Surpass ‘Infinite Jest.’” The New Yorker, 9 Mar. 2009, pp. 48-61.

McCaffery, Larry. “An Expanded Interview with David Foster Wallace.” Conversations with David Foster Wallace, edited by Stephen J. Burn, UP of Mississippi, 2012, pp. 21-52.

McDermott, John J. William James: The Psychology of Possibility. Davidson Films, 2003.

“Memories of David Foster Wallace.” Timothy McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. McSweeney’s, 16 Sept. 2008. mcsweeneys.net/pages/memories-of-david-foster-wallace.

Miller, Laura. “David Foster Wallace.” Salon.com, 9 Mar. 1996. salon.com/1996/03/09/wallace_5.

“Mission Statement.” The International David Foster Wallace Society, 2 Jan. 2017, dfwsociety.org.

Perloff, Marjorie. Wittgenstein’s Ladder: Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary. U of Chicago P, 1999.

Pound, Ezra, contributor. “Manifesto-I.” BLAST, edited by Wyndham Lewis, no. 1, John Lane, 20 June, 1914, pp. 11-29.

Ryerson, James. “A Head That Throbbed Heartlike: The Philosophical Mind of David Foster Wallace.” Fate, Time and Language: An Essay on Free Will, edited by Steven M. Cahn and Maureen Eckert, Columbia UP, 2010, pp. 1-33.

Schmeidel, Stacey. “Brief Interview with a Five Draft Man.” Amherst Magazine, 1999. amherst.edu/amherst-story/magazine/extra/node/66410.

Smith, Zadie. “Brief Interviews with Hideous Men: The Difficult Gifts of David Foster Wallace.” Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays, Penguin, 2009, pp. 257-300.

Spalding, Emily. “The Addiction Spectrum: An Analysis of the Three Branches of Addiction in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest.” Normal 2015: Selected Works from the Second Annual David Foster Wallace Conference, edited by Carissa Kampmeier, et al., Lit Fest, 2016, pp. 119-123.

Travis, Trysh. The Language of the Heart: A Cultural History of the Recovery Movement from Alcoholics Anonymous to Oprah Winfrey. U of North Carolina P, 2013.

Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions. Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, 1952. van Ewijk, Petrus. “‘I’ and the ‘Other’: The Relevance of Wittgenstein, Buber and Levinas for an Understanding of AA’s Recovery Program in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest.” English Text Construction, vol. 2, no. 1, 2009, pp. 132-145.

192

Wallace, David Foster. “1458 Words on a Book That Has More Than 1000 Pages.” Speak Magazine, Spring 1996, pp. 41-42.

---. The Broom of the System. Penguin, 1987.

---. “David Foster Wallace on Life and Work.” The Wall Street Journal, 19 Sept. 2008. wsj.com/articles/SB122178211966454607.

---. “E Unibus Pluram.” A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, Back Bay-Little, Brown, 1997, pp. 21-82.

---. “The Empty Plenum: David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress.” Review of Contemporary Fiction, vol. 10, no. 2, Summer 1990, pp. 217-239.

---. “Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young.” Review of Contemporary Fiction, vol. 8, no. 3, 1988, pp. 36-53.

---. Infinite Jest. Little, Brown, 1996.

---. Interview with Michael Silverblatt. Bookworm, NPR, 2 Mar. 2006. kcrw.com/news- culture/shows/bookworm/david-foster-wallace-consider-the-lobster-and-other-essays.

---. “Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky.” Consider the Lobster and Other Essays, Back Bay-Little, Brown, 2007, pp. 255-274.

---. “Matters of Sense and Opacity.” The New York Times, 2 Aug. 1987. nytimes.com/1987/08/02/books/l-matters-of-sense-and-opacity-773987.html.

---. “The Nature of the Fun.” Both Flesh and Not, Little, Brown, 2012, pp. 193-202.

---. This is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life. Little, Brown, 2009.

Wallace, James D. “Pleasure as an End of Action.” American Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 3, no. 4, 1966, pp. 312-316.

Warhol-Down, Robyn. “Academics Anonymous: A Meditation on Anonymity, Power, and Powerlessness.” Symplokē, vol. 16, nos. 1 & 2, 2008, pp. 51-59.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. Translated by G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, and J. Schulte, rev. 4th ed., Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.

---. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Translated by C.K. Ogden, Dover, 1999.

193

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Robert Short received his PhD from the University of Florida in the spring of 2017. In addition to teaching courses for the Department of English and the University Writing Program, he worked as the webmaster for the English Department and for the United Faculty of Florida.

His work on David Foster Wallace has appeared in Normal 2015: Selected Works from The

Second Annual David Foster Wallace Conference and on the website for James Ponsoldt’s film about Wallace’s extended road-trip interview with David Lipsky, The End of the Tour. He is married to another former doctoral student of the University of Florida’s graduate English program, Dr. Caroline Short. He is originally from Gardendale, Alabama.

194