David Foster Wallace and ""The Long Thing"" : New Essays on the Novels

## Preface xi The first section features four essays that treat a motif, pattern, or trend found in two or three of the novels. The second section features essays devoted to a single work or period of Wallace's career; as such, this section is subdivided into three additional sections. In the collection's opening piece, Adam Kelly provides an important overture to the Wallace corpus as a whole. By comparing key scenes of dialogue in all three novels, Kelly explores the degree to which Wallace might be understood as a novelist of ideas. Drawing upon the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, Kelly argues that Wallace's dialogue owes a debt both to Socratic inquiry and to Dostoevsky's heteroglossia. His essay also explores the degree to which the three novels are in dialogue with one another, each novel addressing conceptual questions remaining behind from the novel before. In "Wallace and Empathy: A Narrative Approach," Toon Staes addresses the numerous ways in which Wallace sets up an empathetic relationship between author, narrator, and text. Allard den Dulk provides a thorough and rigorous account of Wallace's indebtedness to the work of Søren Kierkegaard, paying particular attention to Kierkegaard's concept of irony and its relevance for Wallace's career-long critique of the same. And Andrew Warren, in "Modeling Community and Narative in The Pale King and Infinite Jest," discloses a quartet of narrative models at work in both of Wallace's major novels, arguing that the coexistence of these overlapping and perhaps incompatible narrative modes prompts a continual negotiation among the communities posited or contested in the novels themselves. Bradley J. Fest opens the next section with "'Then Out of the Rubble': David Foster Wallace's Early Fiction," which takes on both The Broom of the System and its novella-length follow up, "Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way," the concluding piece from Girl with Curious Hair. Fest argues that both texts seek to exhaust metafiction in order to prepare the ground for Infinite Jest. The Broom of the System stages what Fest depicts as an apocalyptic battle between two linguistic and narrative teleological poles, that of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Jacques Derrida, while "Westward" confronts the dangers of irony in the postmodern literature via a close dialogue with Paul de Man's "The Rhetoric of Temporality." The following two essays survey the vast terrain that is Infinite Jest. In "Encyclopedic Novels and the Cruft of Fiction," David Letzler looks at Wallace's use of endnotes to argue that Infinite Jest challenges the traditional view of the encyclopedic novel as either a source of knowledge or a critique of totalized systems. Rather, Wallace loads his texts, and the endnotes in particular, with "cruft"-that is, excessive, pointless text-to both test, and provide a tool for building, the reader's ability to manage information. Philip Sayers focuses on the lethally entertaining fictional film that gives Infinite Jest its title. Drawing on the work of Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan, Preface xii and Louis Althusser, Sayers explores not only the fictional purpose of the Entertainment itself but also Wallace's treatment of film in general. Sayers also addresses Wallace's use of ekphrasis in the context of representing film. Drawing on the work of W. J. T. Mitchell and others, Sayers analyzes the way in which Wallace's descriptions of films in the novel suggest similarities and differences between the two media. The remaining four pieces represent some of the earliest scholarship on Wallace's unfinished third novel. Much of the work included here originated as papers or keynote addresses delivered at a September 2011 conference held in Antwerp, Belgium titled "Work in Process: Reading David Foster Wallace's The Pale King" and organized by Toon Staes. Fellow contributor Stephen Burn and I had the honor of delivering a pair of keynote addresses that opened and closed the conference. Adam Kelly's essay originated at that conference, as did three of the essays included in this final subsection. Drawing upon his own keynote, Stephen Burn explores Wallace's abiding focus on the workings of consciousness writ large, while also disclosing a wide range of intriguing fictional analogs for the novel's portrait of the bureaucratic workspace. In "What Am I, a Machine?": Humans and Information in The Pale King," Conley Wouters lays out the complex and ambiguous ways in which Wallace dramatizes the conflict between humans and machines, and between organisms and data. My own essay, which is also a revision of my keynote address, examines the novel's treatment of civic responsibility and taxation by way of William James's Varieties of Religious Experience. These three essays are joined by Ralph Clare's lucid and rigorous analysis of one of The Pale King's central themes, boredom, and the related issue of paying attention. I wish to express my sincerest thanks to Toon Staes for organizing the 2011 Wallace conference in Belgium, and for allowing me to "poach" some of the essays from that conference. I am also grateful to everyone at Studies in the Novel, particularly Tim Boswell (no relation) and Jacqueline Foertsch, for all the hard work they did preparing these essays for their periodical appearance. And hearty thanks also to Haaris Naqvi, Laura Murray, and everyone else at Bloomsbury for their help and patience throughout this process. Thanks also to Scott Garner for his eagle-eyed proofreading and thorough work on the index. Finally, I wish to lift a foamy mug of mead to all my contributors, all of whom hit every deadline and responded to every nagging email request in record time. Cover HalfTitle Title Copyright Contents Preface: David Foster Wallace and “The Long Thing” Abbreviations Part One Wallace as Novelist 1 David Foster Wallace and the Novel of Ideas Dialogic dialogue Broom logic Infinite politics Pale history Novel ideas 2 Wallace and Empathy: A Narrative Approach The Victorian connection Infinite Jest, naturalization, and unnatural narration The Pale King and the overdetermined text 3 Boredom, Irony, and Anxiety: Wallace and the Kierkegaardian View of the Self The existentialist view of the self in Kierkegaard and Wallace Irony in the aesthetic and the ethical life-view Boredom, anxiety, and meaningful life 4 Modeling Community and Narrative in Infinite Jest and The Pale King Model#1: Contracted realism in The Pale King Community organizing and model#2: Jargony Argot in Infinite Jest Model#3: Spontaneous data intrusion in The Pale King Model#4: The Free Indirect Wraith in Infinite Jest Somewhere beyond the right frame Part Two The Novels 5 “Then Out of the Rubble”: David Foster Wallace’s Early Fiction Gardening the machine The threat of the text, ironic apocalypse 6 Representing Entertainment in Infinite Jest 7 Encyclopedic Novels and the Cruft of Fiction: Infinite Jest’s Endnotes Endnotes and the paradox of the encyclopedic novel The cruft of fiction Monumental dullness Filtering the Incandenza filmography Infinite Jest’s endnoted geopolitics Data detox Handling information in a grown-up way 8 “A Paradigm for the Life of Consciousness”: The Pale King1 I II III IV 9 “What Am I, a Machine?”: Humans and Information in The Pale King A measure of disorder Riding the crest What am I, a machine? All of this is true 10 The Politics of Boredom and the Boredom of Politics in The Pale King The construction of boredom Boredom and neoliberalism Paying attention: The cost of happiness 11 Trickle-Down Citizenship: Taxes and Civic Responsibility in The Pale King Works Cited Notes on Contributors Index "Of the twelve books David Foster Wallace published both during his lifetime and posthumously, only three were novels. Nevertheless, Wallace always thought of himself primarily as a novelist. From his college years at Amherst, when he wrote his first novel as part of a creative honors thesis, to his final days, Wallace was buried in a novel project, which he often referred to as "the Long Thing." Meanwhile, the short stories and journalistic assignments he worked on during those years he characterized as "playing hooky from a certain Larger Thing." Wallace was also a specific kind of novelist, devoted to producing a specific kind of novel, namely the omnivorous, culture-consuming "encyclopedic" novel, as described in 1976 by Edward Mendelson in a ground-breaking essay on Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. David Foster Wallace and "The Long Thing" is a state-of-the art guide through Wallace's three major works, including the generation-defining Infinite Jest. These essays provide fresh new readings of each of Wallace's novels as well as thematic essays that trace out patterns and connections across the three works. Most importantly, the collection includes six chapters on Wallace's unfinished novel, The Pale King, that will prove to be foundational for future scholars of this important text"-- Provided by publisher Of the twelve books David Foster Wallace published both during his lifetime and posthumously, only three were novels. Nevertheless, Wallace always thought of himself primarily as a novelist. From his college years at Amherst, when he wrote his first novel as part of a creative honors thesis, to his final days, Wallace was buried in a novel project, which he often referred to as "the Long Thing." Meanwhile, the short stories and journalistic assignments he worked on during those years he characterized as "playing hooky from a certain Larger Thing." Wallace was also a specific kind of novelist, devoted to producing a specific kind of novel, namely the omnivorous, culture-consuming "encyclopedic" novel, as described in 1976 by Edward Mendelson in a ground-breaking essay on Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow . David Foster Wallace and "The Long Thing" is a state-of-the art guide through Wallace's three major works, including the generation-defining Infinite Jest. These essays provide fresh new readings of each of Wallace's novels as well as thematic essays that trace out patterns and connections across the three works. Most importantly, the collection includes six chapters on Wallace's unfinished novel, The Pale King , which will prove to be foundational for future scholars of this important text. 1. Introduction: David Foster Wallace and "The Long Thing" Marshall Boswell Part 1: Early 2. Development Through Dialogue: David Foster Wallace and the Novel of Ideas Adam Kelly 3. "The Out of the Rubble": The Apocalypse in David Foster Wallace's Early Fiction Bradley J. Fest Part 2: Middle 4. Encyclopedic Novels and the Cruft of Fiction: Infinite Jest's Endnotes David Letzler 5. Beyond Endless "Aesthetic" Irony: Infinite Jest and Kierkegaard's Critique of Irony Allard den Dulk 6. Representing Entertainment(s) in Infinite Jest Philip Sayers Part 3: Late 7. "A Paradigm for the Life of Consciousness": Closing Time in The Pale King Stephen J. Burn 8. "Narrative Modeling and Community Organizing in The Pale King and Infinite Jest Andrew Warren 9. Rewriting the Author: A Narrative Approach to Empathy in Infinite Jest and The Pale King Toon Staes10. The Politics of Boredom and the Boredom of Politics in The Pale King Ralph Clare 11. "What Am I, a Machine?": Humans, Information, and Matters of Record in The Pale King Conley Wouters 12. Trickle-Down Citizenship: Taxes and Civic Responsibility in David Foster Wallace's The Pale King Marshall Boswell.