Worldwide Foster Wallace
ELSA COURT
David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest was first published in 1996, and immediately inspired comparisons with other lengthy, encyclopedic, experimental works published in the United States since the 1960s – Thomas Pynchon's V emerged as a particular influence on the younger writer. Reviewing Infinite Jest for the TLS, Bharat Tandon saw it as an opportunity to consider the future of the "Big American Novel". Length, it seemed, had become one of the distinctive features of contemporary American fiction – one which Tandon playfully equated with literary merit.
Infinite Jest is indeed a long book; and David Foster Wallace is still thought of as a quintessentially American figure, which makes sense insofar as he wrote about the impatience and hopelessness of late-capitalist American dreams. As many critics have remarked over the past twenty years, it is Wallace's grasp of America's neoliberal economy and entertainment culture that made Infinite Jest a touchstone for a generation. Being himself a great consumer of the major American postmodern authors – from Pynchon to William Gass, and from Donald Bathelme to Don DeLillo and John Barth – Wallace was also a product of what Mark McGurl has called the "Program Era". For McGurl, the rise of the creative writing programme in America has reinforced a contemporary consensus about a "vivacious American individualism" – an isolated and institutionalized tradition to which Wallace himself seemed to be a prominent contributor.
As Lucas Thompson points out in his introduction to Global Wallace: David Foster Wallace and world literature, Wallace had many issues with the insular self-centredness of the typical creative writing MFA. He did time in such an environment, teaching at the University of Arizona, where, rather than familiarizing themselves with Homer or Cervantes, students were encouraged in the belief that "Salinger invented the wheel, Updike internal combustion, and Carver, Beattie, and Phillips drive what's worth chasing". That Wallace took issue with MFA programmes for their sidelining of the canon of Western literature, and their prioritizing of a largely ahistorical, parochial alternative, is testimony to his sense of the writer's duty to participate in the global literary dialogue – a living tradition of linguistic and cultural exchange.
In this context, Thompson's book makes the welcome suggestion that Wallace's subtle, sometimes oblique, but no less important allusions to Latin American, French, or Russian literature ought to be weighed against his interest in what it is to be American. "It is a recurring omission in literary criticism", Thompson argues, "that when authors are claimed by tacitly patriotic scholars with particular national interests, the more expansive, global dimensions of their fiction are suppressed, and become harder to see." With recent revisionist, transnational accounts of Virginia Woolf, Emily Dickinson and Jane Austen in mind, Thompson suggests that a narrow critical consensus about Wallace prevents us from seeing the true richness of his work.
That there is now a Bloomsbury series called David Foster Wallace Studies, to which Global Wallace belongs, testifies to a worldwide growth of interest in that work – yet the goal today, as Thompson argues, must be to "defuse the exceptionalist claims surrounding Wallace's work". Thompson's book is the first to report from the fiction library of Wallace's Harry Ransom Center archive in such depth, and here Thompson has unearthed copious evidence of Wallace's readings of foreign literature – specifically, his marginalia in annotated copies of Dostoevsky, Manuel Puig, Kafka and others. This helps us to put Wallace's "Americanness" in its proper context. Thompson's penultimate chapter, for example, examines the influence of French existentialism on Wallace by way of his interest in the Deep South. In this chapter and throughout the book, Thompson underlines Wallace's "strategies of appropriation": his famous essay "This is Water", strikingly, can be traced back to Walker Percy's novel The Moviegoer. A brief and cryptic preliminary sketch for what Wallace envisaged as a "Story of terrible dread" and "spiritual resurrection", hand-written on the inside flap of his copy of Flannery O'Connor's Collected Stories, shows that rather than directly referencing Sartre or Camus – whom Wallace had read in French – he responded indirectly, via post-war fiction that had already absorbed the influence of French existential thinking.
Thompson's final chapter turns to Wallace's conception of race, considering his varied – and loosely interdependent – interests in popanthropology, myth, cultural archetypes and African American culture. Only here, in the course of a rare account of Wallace's Signifying Rappers – a book that has been criticized for its clumsy, self-affirmed "white yuppie" perspective on race relations in the US – Thompson seems to err, by conflating "global" literature with the diversity of American subcultures Wallace drew on. Thompson also admits that Wallace's relationship with Asia remains to be explored: the archive offers evidence of his interest in post-war and contemporary Japanese novelists, including Yukio Mishima, Yasunari Kawabata and Banana Yoshimoto, as well as Eastern philosophy, particularly Buddhism. A reading of these works in relation to Wallace could have enriched the volume, while the question of Wallace's understanding of race and otherness might make for a book in its own right. All the same, Global Wallace has great merit for turning the notion of Wallace's exceptionalism on its head.
Interpreting Wallace's work is not an easy task. His novels and short stories use many voices; they insert dense analytical jargon into passages of lyrical prose; and they invite readers to go back and forth between the small print of the main text and the smaller print of footnotes: yet Wallace also warned young writers that "The reader cannot read your mind". What are we to make of the formal obstacles his own writing poses, bearing in mind his claim that good writing always actively attempts communication – and his broader injunction to open up and communicate sincerely?
In The Unspeakable Failures of David Foster Wallace, Clare Hayes-Brady suggests that Wallace dramatizes the inward entrapment of consciousness, and invites the reader to struggle against it. Hayes-Brady's title is playfully deceptive: she suggests that Wallace's "failures" are also at the crux of his greatest achievement – namely, his re-enactment of our failure to communicate.
For Hayes-Brady, "commitment to the process of communication (rather than its outcome) is the driving force of [Wallace's] writing". The difficulties he seems to pose derive from his deeper sense of communication as a continuing dialogical process. The "failure" of communication, in this context, is to be understood as "generative": not so much a defeat as an invitation, after Beckett, to use the certainty of failure as a reason to keep trying.
Hayes-Brady's book also strikes against Wallace's apparent exceptionalism, in drawing attention to his philosophical and literary influences. Fiction enabled him to explore philosophical concepts through concrete formal experimentations in ways that philosophical writing would have left at another level of abstraction. Yet Wallace engaged with philosophers such as Paul Ricoeur, Richard Rorty and Wittgenstein, to whom he makes direct references in his first novel, The Broom of the System (1987). The nineteenth-century transcendentalists Emerson and Thoreau, as well as Pynchon and DeLillo, were influences he both acknowledged and resisted, in what Hayes-Brady calls a "schizoaffective critical articulation" of his literary and intellectual heritage.
Although it offers pertinent readings of the constant interplay of philosophy and literature in Wallace's work, Unspeakable Failures falls slightly short of providing a satisfying sense of critical progression, perhaps because it does not spend sufficient time on close examinations of the writing itself. Hayes-Brady could have considered at greater length, for instance, the internal monologue of the catatonic Hal Incandenza at the start of Infinite Jest, a good example of Wallace's concern with solipsism. Making pointed references to such milestone passages but shying away from close readings, the book concentrates on Wallace as an author of ideas, and leaves the task of asserting his place in contemporary American literature incomplete.
In the introduction to David Foster Wallace's Balancing Books: Fictions of value, Jeffrey Severs argues that ideas of economic value, market and exchange inform Wallace's work – his "balancing books" – right up to The Pale King, his posthumously published novel about the Internal Revenue Service.
He argues that The Broom of the System registers the decline of the American work ethic in the Reagan era, while the short story collection Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (1999) maps out an economy of heterosexual relationships – romantic, sexual, nurturing, or the absence thereof – in terms of balanced economic equations. Infinite Jest, meanwhile, experiments with an overlooked "commonwealth" of universal agreement on values, such as measurement systems. It also introduces Wallace's notion of "Subsidized Time":
. . . only as the reader struggles to establish a chronology in Infinite Jest (before getting some help from a calendar [IJ 223]) does it become clear that numbered years are, indeed, a shared civic measurement, a unit essential to finding one's place in the world because time itself seems to all of us a commonwealth subject to privatization . . .
Severs's take on the reader's efforts to read Wallace is not far removed from Hayes-Brady's: "we do interpretative work", he writes, "identifying the opportunities Hal and others have to find ground and value"; in turn, in the process of reading and sharing in the commonwealth of language, we find a similar redemption. "Workers of Wallace, unite" is the injunction made by the chapter on the redemptive power of strenuous work in Infinite Jest; this is a grace that touches the recovering addict Don Gately, but lacking in Hal, the tennis prodigy spoiled for knowledge.
From these three assessments of David Foster Wallace emerges a shared theme: a common determination to question the already established myths, to relocate this prodigal son of American literature in a broader cultural context. Dave Eggers's introduction to the tenth anniversary edition of Infinite Jest argued that "comparisons [of the novel] to anything [before it and] since are desperate and hollow"; these compelling new perspectives offer a necessary corrective to that view.
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