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David Foster Wallace's Oblivion As a Deleuzian Clinical and Critical Project

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David Foster Wallace's Oblivion As a Deleuzian Clinical and Critical Project Faculty of Arts and Philosophy Dagmar De Tandt ‘Making Heads Throb Heartlike’: David Foster Wallace’s Oblivion as a Deleuzian Clinical and Critical Project Supervisor: Sarah Posman Master dissertation submitted in fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of “Master in English” Academic year 2012-2013 Acknowledgments ‘(…) thesis, the project that had occupied and defined me for months’ (Here and There)1 In the car reading interviews with David Foster Wallace: ‘[James Brown: “I Feel Good” in background, on the restaurant sound system]’ (Lipsky 2010, 41). “WAAAAAHW!!” hits the radio. Wallace: This is Water. Tinariwen: Water is Life. Amounts of Pop Gas (Wolfgang Voigt), 2000, label: Mille Plateaux. Four Ivorians with a ‘Champion’ sweater on the TV, my Dad standing next to them with the same sweater. ‘“Gomni” veut dire Le Bonheur’ (http://youtu.be/XwqbU7kgc7k) I do become-dancer to this. Calibri became my font. Thanks to Sarah Posman for guiding me through Deleuze & Wallace. In the end, all my love to Tine and (grand)parents Dagmar, August 2013 1 Wallace 2012, 154 (From: Girl with Curious Hair) Table of Contents 1. Introduction 1 2. Gilles Deleuze and David Foster Wallace 3 2.1. David Foster Wallace Studies 3 2.2. Oblivion and Gilles Deleuze 5 3. Deleuze and Literature 7 3.1. The Clinical and the Critical 8 3.2. Life and Vitalism: Difference and Becoming 9 3.3. The ‘Healthy’ Author 13 3.4. The Literary Machine 18 3.5. Language: Minor and Stutter 20 4. Wallace’s Vitalistic Resistance Against Irony 25 4.1. (Postmodern) Irony 26 4.2. Humour or Superior Irony 28 4.3. Superior Irony in Literature 30 4.4. Wallace’s Vitalistic Resistance Against Irony 32 4.5. Superior Irony and Multiplicity in “Good Old Neon” 37 5. Wallace’s Clinical and Critical Project in “Mister Squishy” 44 5.1. Clinical Oblivion 45 5.2. “Mister Squishy” 49 5.3. Terry Schmidt’s Struggle 57 5.4. Critical Oblivion 62 5.4.1. The Reader 63 5.4.2. The Functioning of “Mister Squishy” 65 5.4.3. The Effects of “Mister Squishy” 72 5.4.4. The Becoming of “Mister Squishy” 76 6. Conclusion 84 7. Appendix 85 8. Works Cited 87 1. Introduction Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) and David Foster Wallace (1962-2008) both felt that tennis is more than simply hitting a ball back and forth over the net. For Deleuze, Björn Borg was a ‘Christlike’ figure because he ‘invented a new style that opened up tennis to a sort of proletariat’ (1995, 132). For Wallace, watching Federer play was a ‘religious experience’ (2006). Both Borg and Federer were inventors of a new way of playing the game. Deleuze admired inventors because they show us ‘something unforeseen, a new syntax, a transformation’ (1995, 132). Similarly, Wallace argued that ‘Federer is able to see, or create, gaps and angles for winners that no one else can envision’ (2006). In this dissertation, I want to show how Wallace is an inventor of a new way of playing the literary game. Moreover, I will discuss how he makes the reader of Oblivion (2004) experience something new and unforeseen. In the first chapter of this dissertation, I will discuss Gilles Deleuze’s approach to literature. In a Deleuzian approach, the literary work is regarded as both a critical and a clinical project. An author provides a clinical diagnosis but he evokes a ‘cure’ through the critical aspect or the style and technique of his work. This is clearly reflected in Wallace’s description of ‘fiction’s limitless possibilities (…) for making heads throb heartlike’ (Wallace 1998, 218). Wallace’s writing style displays this possibility because the head of Wallace’s reader throbs with a clinical diagnosis evoked by his challenging style and technique. In chapter two, I describe how Wallace is an inventor of the literary game. His fiction attempts to go beyond postmodern ironic literature in order to display a certain form of authenticity or sincerity. It will become clear that Wallace’s attempt culminates in a writing style that blends irony and sincerity. This ‘blend’ will be discussed with regard to the story “Good Old Neon”. In chapter three, I discuss Wallace’s critical and clinical project with a focus on the story “Mister Squishy”. The first part of this chapter discusses the clinical diagnosis that is central in all of the stories of Oblivion. Wallace diagnosed how people suffered from their struggle to stay aware and resist forgetfulness or oblivion. This struggle is reflected in the main protagonist of “Mister Squishy”, Terry Schmidt. In the second part of this chapter, I will discuss how Wallace makes the reader aware of his diagnosis through the story’s style and technique. The reader of “Mister Squishy” has to struggle to stay aware amidst an overload 1 of data written in a complex and digressive style. However, I will also argue that Wallace makes the reader experience something unforeseen, gaps and angles we could not envision. Wallace tries to show the reader that he or she does not always have to suffer in the struggle between awareness and oblivion. This dissertation aims to show how Wallace’s fiction can be more for the reader than turning pages, just like tennis more than hitting a ball. David Foster Wallace will prove to confirm Gilles Deleuze’s statement that great authors always want ‘to bring something to life, to free life from where it’s trapped, to trace lines of flight’ (Deleuze 1995, 141). 2 2. Gilles Deleuze and David Foster Wallace David Foster Wallace was an American fiction and essay writer, most famously known as the author of Infinite Jest, the monstrous bestseller published in 1996.3 The literary criticism on Wallace was mostly focused on Infinite Jest, but since his death, ‘his reputation as one of the most significant writers of his era has become firmly established’ (Kelly 2010). In his essay, ‘David Foster Wallace: the Death of the Author and the Birth of a Discipline’, Kelly outlines several ‘waves’ that occurred in ‘Wallace Studies’. He argues how the recent wave in the literary criticism on Wallace, is concerned with his ethical aspects and also his interplay with important thinkers or philosophers. In this dissertation, the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze is used as a useful vantage point for approaching David Foster Wallace’s short story collection Oblivion. Deleuze wrote extensively on literature and he valued and approached literature entirely in his own way. I will show that what Deleuze valued in great literature, can also be found in Wallace’s fiction. In the next chapter, I elaborate on Deleuze’s distinct approach to literature. In the following pages, I will clarify my position with regard to Wallace’s criticism and discuss how this paper is relevant for the study of Wallace’s fiction. 2.1. David Foster Wallace Studies In his essay, Kelly provides us with a clear overview of ‘the development of academic scholarship on Wallace from the early 1990s until his death’ (2010). Kelly argues that there are three important waves in the literary criticism surrounding Wallace. The first wave ‘understood Wallace’s fiction primarily in terms of its emphasis on science and information systems and its intersections with American postmodernism’ (Kelly 2010). In chapter three, I will discuss how Wallace’s writing can be regarded as an attempt to move beyond postmodern literature. The second wave in Wallace Studies was almost entirely concerned 3 For a wonderful summary of Wallace’s life and work, I highly recommend D.T. Max’s article in The New Yorker, “The Unfinished” (2009). Access online: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/03/09/090309fa_fact_max 3 with ‘Wallace’s own articulation of his project’ (Kelly 2010). This refers to Wallace’s essay “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction” (1993) and an interview with Larry McCaffery in 1993. This interview-essay nexus, provided critics with the terms of Wallace’s challenge to prevailing artistic assumptions – focused on the role of irony and metafictional self-reflexivity in contemporary reading – and would greatly shape their reading (Kelly 2010) Wallace’s own articulations became ‘an inescapable point of departure’ (Kelly 2010). There was a general consensus that Wallace’s writing can be regarded ‘as a response to irony and to his literary forefathers’ (Kelly, 5). Similarly, this is also the point of departure for my discussion of David Foster Wallace. In chapter three, I discuss Wallace’s response to irony and his postmodern legacy, which is crucial for understanding how he is an ‘inventor’. The third and latest wave in Wallace’s criticism is refreshing because it moves both beyond Wallace’s own remarks about his writing project and beyond an ‘examination of Wallace’s relation to preceding literary figures’ (Kelly 2010). Wallace’s writing was no longer viewed ‘primarily in terms of aesthetic representation, but of ethical intervention’ (Kelly 2010). This latest wave provided critics and readers with what has been, from a literary-critical perspective, the most striking feature of Wallace Studies thus far: namely the implicit agreement among so many critics with Wallace’s professed premise that fiction should act as both “diagnosis and cure” (Kelly 2010) In this dissertation, Gilles Deleuze’s approach will clarify how Wallace’s stories offer us both a diagnosis and a possible cure. Furthermore, the use of Gilles Deleuze as a vantage point coincides with another characteristic of the third wave. Adam Kelly remarked that most of the papers presented at the Wallace conferences in 2009, were ‘conspicuous for the extent to which prevailing theoretical systems, and a wide variety of theorists, were engaged with as the major foil for Wallace’s fiction’ (2010).
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