Marginalia after Modernism: the case of David Foster Wallace A thesis submitted to The University of Manchester for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Faculty of Humanities 2015 John Roache School of Arts, Languages and Cultures 2 Contents List of Figures ................................................................................................................... 4 Abbreviations: Texts by David Foster Wallace ................................................................ 8 Abstract ............................................................................................................................. 9 Declaration ..................................................................................................................... 10 Copyright Statement ........................................................................................................ 11 Presentation of Archival Materials ................................................................................. 12 Acknowledgements .......................................................................................................... 13 Introduction – Marginalia after Modernism .............................................................. 14 0.1 Preface .................................................................................................................. 14 0.2 From Copious Notes to Coleridgean Relics: a Romantic History of the Margin ..................................................................................................................................... 17 0.3 Reading Notes: Sylvia Plath’s Dangerous Obscurity, William Blake’s Theory of Art…... ......................................................................................................................... 33 0.4 Manuscript Marginalia: Archival Labours and Aesthetic Mediation ................... 44 0.5 Pseudo-scholarly Footnotes: Popean Sneers, Modernist Dissociation, and the Legitimation Crisis ...................................................................................................... 55 0.6 A Note on Archival Research ............................................................................... 69 Chapter One – ‘The realer, more enduring and sentimental part of him’: Wallace’s Library and Marginalia .............................................................................. 73 1.1 DFW’s Family Secrets ......................................................................................... 73 1.2 W’s Theory of Art? The Library’s Portrait of an Artist ....................................... 88 1.3 ‘Not another word’: Origins, Identification, Mourning ...................................... 100 Chapter Two – ‘A certain threshold of concentrated boredom’: Authority and Mediation in the Margins of Wallace’s Archive ....................................................... 112 2.1 Authorizing The Pale King ................................................................................. 112 3 2.2 Plagiarizing Wallace ........................................................................................... 129 2.3 Choreography and Chaos in ‘Eschaton’; or, the Elegance of Infinite Jest’s Complexity ................................................................................................................ 148 Chapter Three – ‘No clue’: Wallace’s Endnotes to Postmodernism ...................... 166 3.1 Theory’s Disappearance and Return................................................................... 166 3.2 ‘Do you feel it too?’: Sincerity and Affect in ‘Octet’......................................... 180 3.3 Reading (Post)Modern Centrality ....................................................................... 191 Conclusion .................................................................................................................... 205 4.1 ‘… which transcription ended up making the book valuable, in terms of reproduction, decades later’: Wallace in the Margins of Modernism ....................... 205 4.2 Concluding Notes ............................................................................................... 212 Bibliography .................................................................................................................. 217 Appendix ........................................................................................................................ 238 Word Count: 85,996 4 List of Figures Figure 1 – David Foster Wallace, annotation in H. L. Hix, Morte d’Author: An Autopsy, HRCDFW-L (Reproduced courtesy of the Harry Ransom Centre, Austin, TX). ......... 238 Figure 2 – David Foster Wallace, annotation in H. L. Hix, Morte d’Author: An Autopsy, citing Michel Foucault, HRCDFW-L (Reproduced courtesy of the Harry Ransom Centre, Austin, TX) ....................................................................................................... 238 Figure 3 – David Foster Wallace, annotation in H. L. Hix, Morte d’Author: An Autopsy, citing Roland Barthes, HRCDFW-L (Reproduced courtesy of the Harry Ransom Centre, Austin, TX) ................................................................................................................... 239 Figure 4 – Miles Coverdale's 1537 revision of the Matthew Bible (Reproduced courtesy of http://printinghistory.org.uk) ...................................................................... 240 Figure 5 – Sylvia Plath, annotation in Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim (Reproduced courtesy of Sotheby’s) ................................................................................................................. 241 Figure 6 – William Blake, annotation in Sir Joshua Reynolds, The Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds (Reproduced courtesy of the British Library) ............................................... 242 Figure 7 – Vladimir Nabokov, annotation in Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis (Reproduced courtesy of Pan Press) ............................................................................. 243 Figure 8 – David Foster Wallace, annotation in Cormac McCarthy, Suttree, HRCDFW-L (Reproduced courtesy of the Harry Ransom Centre, Austin, TX) .......... 244 Figure 9 – Djuna Barnes, ‘Jefferson,-675-2277’ (Reproduced courtesy of The Authors League Fund and St. Bride’s Church) ........................................................................... 245 Figure 10 – James Joyce’s ‘notorious coloured crayons’, from Dublin, National Library of Ireland, The Joyce Papers 2002, ‘III.v. Pages from Finnegans Wake notebook’, MS 36,639/18/B/19 (Reproduced courtesy of the National Library of Ireland) .......................................................................................................................... 246 Figure 11 – David Foster Wallace, annotation in H. L. Hix, Morte d’Author: An Autopsy, citing William H. Gass, I, HRCDFW-L (Reproduced courtesy of the Harry Ransom Centre, Austin, TX) ......................................................................................... 247 Figure 12 – David Foster Wallace, annotation in H. L. Hix, Morte d’Author: An Autopsy, citing William H. Gass, II, HRCDFW-L (Reproduced courtesy of the Harry Ransom Centre, Austin, TX) ......................................................................................... 247 Figure 13 – David Foster Wallace, annotation in Don DeLillo, Americana, HRCDFW- L (Reproduced courtesy of the Harry Ransom Centre, Austin, TX) ............................ 248 Figure 14 – David Foster Wallace, annotation in Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property, HRCDFW-L (Reproduced courtesy of the Harry Ransom Centre, Austin, TX) ......................................................................................... 248 Figure 15 – David Foster Wallace, annotation in James Joyce, Stephen Hero, HRCDFW-L (Reproduced courtesy of the Harry Ransom Centre, Austin, TX) .......... 249 5 Figure 16 – David Foster Wallace, annotation on reverse spine of Hazard Adams, Critical Theory Since Plato, HRCDFW-L (Reproduced courtesy of the Harry Ransom Centre, Austin, TX) ....................................................................................................... 250 Figure 17 – David Foster Wallace, annotation in Kit Reed, Story First: The Writer As Insider, HRCDFW-L (Reproduced courtesy of the Harry Ransom Centre, Austin, TX)... ....................................................................................................................................... 250 Figure 18 – David Foster Wallace, annotation in Leo Tolstoy, What is Art?, HRCDFW-L (Reproduced courtesy of the Harry Ransom Centre, Austin, TX) .......... 251 Figure 19 – David Foster Wallace, annotation in John Gardner, On Moral Fiction, HRCDFW-L (Reproduced courtesy of the Harry Ransom Centre, Austin, TX) .......... 251 Figure 20 – David Foster Wallace, annotation in Richard Rohr, Everything Belongs: The Gift of Contemplative Prayer, HRCDFW-L (Reproduced courtesy of the Harry Ransom Centre, Austin, TX) ......................................................................................... 252 Figure 21 – David Foster Wallace, annotation in Susan Faludi, Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man, HRCDFW-L (Reproduced courtesy of the Harry Ransom Centre, Austin, TX) ................................................................................................................... 252 Figure 22 – David Foster Wallace, annotation in Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, HRCDFW-L (Reproduced courtesy of the Harry Ransom Centre,