Cognition, Consciousness, and Dualism in David Foster Wallace's

Redgate, Jamie Peter (2017) Wallace and I: cognition, consciousness, and dualism in David Foster Wallace’s fiction. PhD thesis, University of Glasgow. https://theses.gla.ac.uk/8635/ Copyright and moral rights for this work are retained by the author A copy can be downloaded for personal non-commercial research or study, without prior permission or charge This work cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the author The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the author When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given Enlighten: Theses https://theses.gla.ac.uk/ [email protected] WALLACE AND I Cognition, Consciousness, and Dualism in David Foster Wallace’s Fiction Jamie Peter Redgate Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English Literature School of Critical Studies College of Arts University of Glasgow September 2017 © Jamie Peter Redgate 2017 i Abstract Though David Foster Wallace is well known for declaring that “Fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being” (Conversations 26), what he actually meant by the term “human being” has been quite forgotten. It is a truism in Wallace studies that Wallace is a posthuman writer whose characters are devoid of any kind of inner interiority or soul. This is a misreading of Wallace’s work. My argument is that Wallace’s work and his characters—though they are much neglected in Wallace studies—are animated by the tension between materialism and essentialism, and this dualism is one of the major ways in which Wallace bridges postmodern fiction with something new. My project is itself part of this post-postmodern turn, a contribution to the emerging field of cognitive literary studies which has tried to move beyond postmodernism by bringing a renewed focus on the sciences of mind to literary criticism. As yet, this field has largely focused on fiction published before the twentieth century. I expand the purview of cognitive literary studies and give a rigorous and necessary account of Wallace’s humanism. In each chapter I discuss a particular concern that Wallace shares with his predecessors (authorship; selfhood; therapy; free will), and explore how Wallace’s dualism informs his departure from postmodernism. I begin by setting out the key scientific sources for Wallace, and the embodied model of mind that was foundational to his writing and his understanding, especially after Barthes’s “Death of the Author,” of the writing process. In chapter 2, I unravel the unexamined but hugely significant influence of René Descartes on Wallace’s ghost stories, showing that Wallace’s work is not as posthuman as it is supposed to be. In chapter 3, I discuss the dualist metaphors that Wallace consistently uses to describe an individual’s experience of sickness. Focusing on the interior lives of both therapist and patient in Wallace’s work, I show that Wallace’s therapy fictions are a critical response to postmodern anti-psychiatry. Finally, in chapter 4, I reconcile Wallace’s dualist account of material body and essential mind by setting his work against both the history of the philosophy of free will and postmodern paranoid fiction. If Wallace’s fiction is about what it is to be a human being, this thesis is about the human ‘I’ at the heart of Wallace’s work. ii Acknowledgements I am especially grateful to my supervisor and mentor Stephen Burn, under whose patient guidance I learned how to write, and to all the members of the University of Glasgow’s long- running lengthy-literature reading group, in whose company I learned how to read. This project would not have been possible without the funding I received from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, via the Scottish Graduate School for Arts and Humanities [grant number AH/L503915/1]. I am also grateful to them for the opportunity to visit the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, and grateful to the Center itself for giving me access to their collections. Thank you to Megan Coyer and Chris Gair for their generous supervision at this project’s beginning and end, and to Gavin Miller and Bryony Randall for their feedback at different stages of the writing. Thank you, also, to Marshall Boswell and Helen Stoddart for their official stamps of approval at the viva. My family doubled in size when I got married in my project’s first year, and I am grateful to all of them for their support. Thank you, in particular, to Rachael. iii Contents Abstract i Acknowledgements ii Introduction. “[An] alarmed call to arms”: Cognitive Science, the Humanities, and the End of Postmodernism 1 Wallace’s Humanist Fiction 1 “Theory after ‘Theory’” 7 How to Read Wallace’s Mind 15 1. “It’s much more boneheaded and practical than that”: Authorship and the Body 28 The Death of David Foster Wallace 28 The Mind behind Wallace’s Work 34 “Cognitive Questions” 45 “The Nature of the Fun” 56 2. “He’s a ghost haunting his own body”: Cartesian Dualism in Wallace’s Ghost Stories 66 Wallace the Posthumanist 66 Interiority in the Early Stories 72 “I am soul” 79 “Forever Overhead” 93 Dualism in The Pale King 102 “I desire to believe” 108 3. “The heat just past the glass doors”: Therapy, Madness, and Metaphor 113 “A very glib guy”? 113 “Looking at stuff under glass” 118 Wallace’s Treatment of Doctors 125 “A hell for one” 138 4. “(At Least) Three Cheers for Cause and Effect”: Free Will, Addiction, and the Self 154 “Both flesh and not” 154 Free Will vs. the Body 160 Free Will after Postmodernism 163 “An individual person’s basic personal powerlessness” 174 “Pre-Nuptial Agreement of Heaven and Hell” 180 Works Cited 193 1 Introduction “[An] alarmed call to arms”: Cognitive Science, the Humanities, and the End of Postmodernism There is a spectacle greater than the sea, and that is the sky; there is a spectacle greater than the sky, and that is the human soul. To write the poem of the human conscience, were it only that of a single man, were it only that of the most insignificant man, would be to meld all epics into one superior epic, the epic to end all. What a sombre thing is this infinity that each man carries with him. —Victor Hugo, Les Misérables (184) Wallace’s Humanist Fiction David Foster Wallace was a profoundly humanist writer. This is not to say simply that Wallace’s work is meaningful and moving, but that it is these things because Wallace was a humanist in the traditional sense, a writer whose subject, from the beginning of his career to its end, was the spectacle of the human soul and the “infinity,” as Victor Hugo puts it, “that each man carries with him” (184). Though Wallace is well known for his declaration that “Fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being” (Conversations 26), what Wallace actually meant by the term ‘human being’ has been quite forgotten. It is a truism in Wallace studies that Wallace was a posthumanist writer, one who was too theoretically sophisticated to write about human beings who have, as is traditional, some kind of inner essence or soul.1 I will challenge this prevailing view. Though questions about the nature of human beings and the relationship between body and soul go largely undiscussed in Wallace studies, they are at the very centre of Wallace’s project and should not go ignored. What is a human being? Denis Diderot’s entry on “Man” in the Encyclopédie says that “Man is composed of two substances, one known as soul, the other known as body.” Yet the relationship between these substances, between what Wallace calls “bodies, minds, and spirits” (Infinite Jest 503), has been debated for millennia, and there is no easy definition for 1 Posthumanism is a loaded theoretical term, and one which I will discuss and define in much more detail in chapter 2. Very loosely, posthumanism is a critique of humanism and the view that human beings have an autonomous, indivisible essence (a soul, a self, an ‘I’) that inhabits a body. 2 any of these terms. Plato thought of the soul as “a long-lived thing” and the “body [a]s relatively feeble and short-lived” (Last Days 159), but the history of philosophy is, as George Makari puts it, the history of “the eternal soul” losing “ground to the fallible,” biological “mind” (Makari 135). In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the belief that human beings possessed some immortal, immaterial essence came up against Newton’s clockwork universe and the increasingly undeniable idea that human beings might be made entirely of matter. Though René Descartes understood that all life, including the human body and brain, were mechanical, he did deny that the important bit—the soul, the ‘I,’ the thinking part of ‘Man’—was part of the material universe. But it only got worse for the soul from there. John Locke reconceptualised humans as beings with bodies and “mind[s]” (Makari 150). For Locke it was no longer the soul that constituted a human being’s identity but the mind (though the soul was still tacked onto most models of mind for the sake of propriety).2 Locke’s mind is not divine and divorced from the machine-body, as the ‘I’ was for Descartes, but a fallible, material entity.

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