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When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given. 1 ‘Something Real American’: David Foster Wallace and Authenticity Iain Williams PhD in English Literature The University of Edinburgh 2015 2 Declaration This is to certify that that the work contained within has been composed by me and is entirely my own work. No part of this thesis has been submitted for any other degree or professional qualification. Chapter one has previously been published (in slightly altered form) as ‘(New) Sincerity in David Foster Wallace’s “Octet”’ in Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 56.3 (2015): 299-314. Signed: 3 Lay Summary It has become something of a truism to contend that David Foster Wallace was concerned with irony; both its challenge to ethical conviction and the ability of the author to enact sincere communication in the millennial United States. However, this privileging of sincerity within Wallace Studies has resulted in neglect being shown to the first half of Polonius’ famous dialectic – ‘to thine own self be true’ – precluding analysis of Wallace that focuses on his relationship with authenticity. Similarly, critics have often sought to argue for Wallace’s panhuman universalism, to the detriment of the overtly nationalistic strain in his writing. This thesis aims to address these underrepresented areas within Wallace scholarship, arguing that his writing is fundamentally engaged with a debate over what it means to be ‘real American’. The phrase is taken from a 1996 interview with Salon.com’s Laura Miller, during which Wallace averred that his intention when writing Infinite Jest was to capture ‘something real American, about what it’s like to live in America around the millenium’ (Conversations with David Foster Wallace 59). This comment is central to an understanding of Wallace’s oeuvre, as it introduces his historical specificity and his pragmatic desire to explore ‘what it’s like to live’, whilst also alluding to his constant negotiation with epistemological and ontological questions over the ‘real’, all framed within an expressly nationalistic paradigm. The word ‘real’ is used in this sense both as an adverb to connote something that is authentically or intrinsically ‘American’, whilst it also serves as an intensifier – to denote something that is very American – implying a hierarchy of things that can be more ‘American’ than others. With regards to his immediate historical context, this entrenches Wallace firmly within the Culture Wars of the 1990s, and yet it also gestures further back in history, situating him within a fundamentally American literary tradition: the American Jeremiad. Wallace’s challenge was to attempt to engage with ideas of the real and the really American, despite the challenges to authenticity (and indeed the idea of a nation) that resulted from the permeation of myriad contemporary discourses into the national psyche, including advertising jargon, postmodern/poststructural ‘theory’, the language of psychotherapy, the discourse of political correctness, and the partisan rhetoric of politicians. The first two chapters will focus on Wallace's engagement with ostensible challenges to the 'authentic' subject, and the difficulty of authentically representing the self. Chapter one will focus on 'Octet' and Wallace's uneasy place within the so-called 'New Sincerity' paradigm, highlighting Wallace’s attempt to counter the discourse of ‘postmodern irony’ with an ‘other- directed’ sincerity, and yet exposing his conservative project of self-preservation. Chapter two will examine Wallace's often fraught relationship with psychotherapy; in particular the way that psychotherapeutic discourse has infiltrated American culture, precluding the singularity and authentic representation of individual experience. Chapter three will continue this exploration of the widespread adoption of specialist discourses, although this time focusing on the abstractions of postmodern/poststructural theory, and Wallace’s attempt to find ‘real American’ replacement cultural symbols that could be applied to both individuals and the nation as a collective. Chapter four will be concerned with Wallace's search for an efficacious philosophical model that is suitably 'American'; whilst also capable of incorporating the singularity of individual experience within a national collectivity. Finally, chapter five will focus on Wallace's more explicit engagement with politics, tracing the development of his political ideas. In doing so a picture of Wallace will emerge that highlights some of his contradictions; contradictions that he himself was aware of and drew attention to, as well as contradictions that run to the very heart of 'the idea of America'. 4 Contents Introduction ............................................................................................................................................. 5 Chapter One: ‘Octet’ and the ‘New Sincerity’ ...................................................................................... 33 Chapter Two: ‘A Real American Kind of Sadness’: Wallace, Depression and Psychotherapy .......... 57 Chapter Three: ‘My America’: David Foster Wallace and ‘Authentic’ U.S. Culture......................... 105 Chapter Four: David Foster Wallace and ‘Real American’ Philosophy ............................................. 139 Chapter Five: ‘An Age Between’: Wallace and U.S. Politics ............................................................. 175 Works Cited ........................................................................................................................................ 215 Notes ................................................................................................................................................... 235 5 ‘Something Real American’: David Foster Wallace and Authenticity On the 6th of July 1995, President Bill Clinton presented some remarks at his alma mater, Georgetown University, in Washington, D.C.: I think we have got to move beyond division and resentment to common ground. We've got to go beyond cynicism to a sense of possibility. America is an idea. We're not one race. We're not one ethnic group. We're not one religious group. We do share a common piece of ground here. But you read the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution: This country is an idea. And it is still going now in our 220th year because we all had a sense of possibility. We never thought there was a mountain we couldn't climb, a river we couldn't ford, or a problem we couldn't solve. What's that great line in the wonderful new movie "Apollo 13," "Failure is not an option." You have to believe in possibility. And if you're cynical, you can't believe in possibility.1 Here Clinton enumerates many of the key themes that have characterised the United States since its conception, themes that were perhaps even more pertinent by this juncture in the middle of the 1990s: the centrality of diversity to the U.S. imaginary despite its inherent challenge to notions of a national collectivity; a rhetorical and ideological emphasis on belief and possibility; above all, the identification of the nation as an idea. The seemingly innocuous mention of Ron Howard’s Apollo 13 (1995) is also prescient, highlighting political figures’ increasing willingness to refer to popular culture – in what is simultaneously a cynical condescension to the audience and a reflection of the growing postmodern acceptance of pop culture within the realms of intellectual and public discourse – but also serving as an introduction to the underlying tensions of the decade that begat the term ‘Culture Wars’. Considering the immediate context of the Georgetown speech – given two days after the 219th birthday of the nation, barely two months after the Oklahoma City bombing, and with the collapse of the Soviet Union still a fundamental issue (Clinton later emphasises that ‘the Soviet Union is no more’) – Clinton perhaps invokes the film as a ‘nostalgic reminder of a time, not so long ago, when Americans accepted a difficult challenge and saw it through to a 6 triumphant conclusion’ (Crouch 1181). On the contrary, the varying responses that the film provoked illustrate the ‘divisions and resentment’ that Clinton’s speech was ostensibly an attempt to overcome. Juxtaposed with the celebration of U.S. exceptionalism that was resonant in the triumph of Apollo 11, Apollo 13 implies that the U.S. entered into a period of declension at the turn of the 1960s. Indeed, the film’s famous misquotation of the flight’s actual transcript – actor Tom Hanks’ ‘Houston, we have a problem’ replaces Jim Lovell’s ‘Houston, we’ve had a problem’ – reinforces the notion that the United States is in a current state of crisis, a crisis that has reverberated