David Foster Wallace

The Ominous Arrival of the Pale King

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So, I’m not joking about this at all: David Foster Wallace’s forthcoming posthumous novel, The Pale King (2011), which is not due out for two weeks yet, arrived early today in my mailbox. Now, if it had arrived at virtually any other moment in time I would have simply been pleased to receive something I’ve been looking forward to for quite a while, but for it arrive today, today, the day I finished the first complete draft of my (very long indeed) dissertation chapter on ole DFW, a chapter I’ve been working on for almost a year now, a subject I researched for months, and have been writing since about October. . . well . . . .

As I cannot help but be in high-gear-grad-school-dissertation-anxiety-mode, one might think the universe is trying to tell me something, and I’ve boiled down the universe’s message to the following possibilities: 1) Great job on getting that massive amount of work finished! On to the next thing (Pynchon), and oh, by the way, here’s a little (much appreciated) gift for all your trouble; or, the far more disturbing 2) Ha ha! Just when you thought you were done w/ something a 500+ pg. novel of the writer you’re working on shows up on your door to potentially confound everything you’ve been working on so diligently and single-mindedly on for so long you can’t remember what it is like to not work on DFW. Nelson’s taunts (from the ole The Simpsons) have nothing on the universe if it is indeed taunting me in this way.

All that said, 50 pp. in and it looks like #1 is the universe’s msg., though I still have 500 pp. to go, and knowing the nature of such complex entities as “universal msgs.,” I’m not hedging any bets. Stay tuned. . . .

The Virtuous Feedback Loop of Influence: Barth Reading Wallace Reading Barth

/ Bradley J. Fest / 3 Comments

So, I just realized I probably should have posted this earlier, but here is an abstract of a paper I delivered a couple weeks ago at the 2011 Duquesne Graduate Conference, “Echoes: Across Disciplines, Texts, Times.” I had the great pleasure of presenting with my good friends and colleagues Ryan Pierson, who talked about Wallace and Wittgenstein in his paper, “David Foster Wallace on Solipsism and the Private Language Argument,” and Racheal Forlow, who delivered a quite fascinating paper on Wallace and Henry James, “Mass Culture and Fiction’s Recursive Futures: James, Wallace, and One Hundred Years of American Formalism.” My abstract is below. If you’re interested in looking at the entire paper, get in touch w/ me.

“The Virtuous Feedback Loop of Influence: Barth Reading Wallace Reading Barth”

Postmodern literature has long been understood in terms of how it complicates, questions, and explodes previous modernist modes of aesthetic influence and textual reference.  Unlike Harold Bloom’s“anxiety of influence,” however, the relationship between the work of John Barth and David Foster Wallace provides an instance of intertextuality more complex than this mostly unidirectional model, tracing instead a synchronic web of recursive feedback loops in which each author is engaged in a project of explicitly rereading and repurposing the other.  This paper will present Barth’s 2001 novel, Coming Soon!!!—a self-reflexive sequel to his first novel, The Floating Opera (1956)—as a response to Wallace’s early novella “Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way” (1989), which is itself a response to Barth’s seminal short story “Lost in the Funhouse” (1967).  Through exploring how these works are everywhere engaged with specifically echoing each other, as well as heeding each writer’s conception of literary influence in their own critical essays, this intervention will question what is historically at stake for a specific American literary practice as it becomes aware of itself as postmodern.  Following this, I will argue that what the work of Barth and Wallace point toward is a rhizomatic, anti-patricidal model of literary influence and a conception of contemporaneity that acknowledges reiteration to be a fundamental aspect of its aesthetic regime.

A (Little) Bit of DFW Archival Nonsense

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(Note: for many the following may not come as news whatsoever, as the important events occurred in 2004 and 2009 respectively.  For the rest, enjoy.)

Just read Jay Murray Siskind’s review of Boswell’s Understanding DFW and DFW’s Oblivion, “An Undeniably Controversial and Perhaps Even Repulsive Talent,” from a 2004 issue of Modernism/modernity.  And the thing is, it took me all of, oh, four seconds to realize that this review was “written” by the same Jay Murray Siskind who so famously described the Most Photographed Barn in America in Don DeLillo’s White Noise.  What is so incredible about this very small “hoax,” is that it took almost 5 years–and many serious citations of the review by graduate students, mind you–for anyone to notice it, namely Mark Sample over at Sample Reality.  (Also read about it here and here and here.)  Even more surprising w/r/t this “hoax” is the clear fact that Hal Incandenza is referenced as an author in the first footnote!  For anyone working on DFW to not notice this, nor, perhaps even more criminally, to not read footnotes in an article on DFW (!), well. . . .

Sample and others are clear to point out that this “Littlest Literary Hoax” suggests some fairly dark things about academic publishing and scholarship–i.e. did anyone actually read the article in the first place (or does anyone even read literary scholarship much at all, for that matter); that more people have responded in the electronic realm (i.e. no published self-account in Modernism/modernity); and that a whole army of grads and undergrads referenced the article w/o any awareness whatsoever of White Noise (seriously, isn’t White Noise, like, as close to required pomo reading as it gets [w/ the exception, say, of Beloved]?  Like Cont. Am. Lit.’s version of Relativity for Physicists?).  But, then again, I wonder how many people, like myself, quickly caught the hoax, laughed a bit to themselves, found it clever, and immediately suggestive of a whole host of interesting pomo/popomo(/not to mention mo) debates that DFW is so clearly involved in, and then simply moved on, for it was essentially nothing more than a (fairly good and funny) book review–these various (fictional) readers not feeling the need, unlike my current self, to comment much further on it in any other forum.

Either way, though, the archival implications of this are fairly interesting, if for no other reason than DFW’s clear affinity for DeLillo; my own sense is that the very explosive archival nature of DFW’s work almost calls forth or demands that Hal Incandenza enter into the real world of ideas through a footnote to some obscure and (clearly) overlooked academic article.  Hyperachivization indeed.  (Also, Incandenza’s title is telling: How I Conquered Analysis: Ten Ways to Dupe Your Therapist [Elisingborg: Yorick Press, 1998], or perhaps a better title would be: Ten Ways to Dupe Literary Scholars Who Clearly Haven’t Read Enough (of What They’re Supposed to be Getting Paid to Read) and Didn’t Even Get the Hamlet! References in the Footnote.)

Anyway, just thought I’d (re-)share.   And now, (back) to the archive, and step on it!

Repackaging the Archive (Part IV): Some Notes on Sincerity in David Foster Wallace’s Uncollected and Less-Well-Known Work

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Where is your compassion?  Where is my compassion?

—Lullaby for the Working Class[1]

Wittgenstein Week is over, something I perhaps shouldn’t have been looking forward to as much as I was; cf. now working through David Foster Wallace’s[2] uncollected and less-well-known oeuvre[3] as quickly.  For my sensitive summer nerves, w/ nothing to do but sit around reading short story after short story for days, I must say I’m missing good-ole Wittgenstein Week.  For instance, I can now, w/ the exception of most book reviews, say confidently that I’ve read pretty much everything DFW has published, in whatever venue (say, even including letters to the editor in The New York Times and Harper’s, and a story in an obscure journal printed on dot-matrix paper [if you can believe it]).  (This is also to say that when I sat down to write just now I hadn’t even quite considered the archival implications of this last statement.)  I thought I’d be glad, that getting through all of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, The Blue and Brown Books, and Philosophical Investigations in a week would be the “hard,” “taxing,” “draining,” “etc.” work;—and believe me, it was—that I’d come out the other end primed and ready for the “fun” work of reading DFW.  Boy was I wrong.

I am currently quite eager to read one of the first collections of essays on DFW coming out next month, Consider David Foster Wallace: Critical Essays, edited by David Hering, specifically an essay on what is being called the “new sincerity” by Adam Kelly.  I feel the DFW that gets read the most—his novel(s) and his journalism—continually hint at or give great meaningful gestures toward sincerity, but perhaps b/c of their form never really achieve what so many of his short stories do so devastatingly, howling-fantod-inspiringly well: they are un-dauntingly sincere.  Painful sincerity.  So sincere that reading the deep ironies of something like John Barth’s much anthologized “Lost in the Funhouse” acts like a kind of balm.  For the sensitive summer soul, the cold analysis of Wittgenstein is far preferable to the at times crushing-lack-of-irony in some of DFW’s short fiction.  Esp. when one reads story after story of people who simply cannot connect w/ one another, for every reason under the sun; or else people who are almost supernaturally connected[4] and subsequently get dramatically, heart-wrenchingly sundered from one another.[5] Basically, where’s Paul de Man when you need him?

His work is just so sad.  The humor found in Infinite Jest or his journalism is muted at best in his short work, and it becomes at times so dark that I’ve literally had to simply put down the book, copy-paper, or computer.  Many people have argued that this is DFW trying to transcend/go one step past postmodernism, and though there may be a distinctive ring-of-truth in that claim, his brutal sincerity—perhaps sincere b/c, like some dialectical parallax, his irony can be equally brutal—seems to simply come from a complete lack of belief in the possibility of real sincerity (; the only way to even begin to hope to construct something authentic is to be so brutal w/r/t emotion etc. b/c the “real” emotions he is trying to construct simply don’t exist in the real world).  His piece on The David Letterman Show, “My Appearance,”[6] demonstrates this quite nicely.  The ground of any sincerity being possible anywhere w/in the space of the story has been more-or-less annihilated, as the last sentence (among others) clearly implies: “And so I did ask my husband, . . . just what way he thought he and I really were, then did he think.  Which turned out to be a mistake.”[7] Or for instance, consider one of the character’s take on Mr. Letterman himself: “‘He’s making money ridiculing the exact things that have put him in a position to make money ridiculing things.”[8] To perhaps oversimplify, what DFW is so clearly criticizing throughout this story is the hipper-than-thou, against all clichés, ironic, detached, cool, postmodern, always-apt-to-ridicule stance (toward pretty much everything) par excellence.  (And furthermore, never celebrating anything, god forbid.)  Of course there’s really no foundation in anything true to back up this stance that perhaps most of us are more familiar w/ than we’d like to be.[9] The general malaise over truth(s of any kind) has been so infectious to simply create an entire simulacral culture w/ no authentic grounding in anything except its own irony.  (And of course) This is an old story (simulation, etc., esp. for the late 80s).

But that’s not the kicker.  DFW is trying so mightily to repair or at least construct the scaffolding for grounding something, anything, in sincerity.  And he never does.  The world is (almost) always more-or-less freaking bleak w/r/t sincerity, connection, compassion, warmth, mindfulness, love, etc. etc.; and not always b/c they simply don’t exist, but rather b/c they get absolutely crushed.  (This is also why perhaps his 2005 Kenyon Address was received so well.  It was so [frankly] crazily sincere; and, unlike his fiction, suggests an “answer” to this problem.)

Suffice it to say, the hyperarchivization of DFW is not an experience I would recommend in a(n overly-)short period of time.  It, combined w/ general summer-nervousness, is getting me quite down.  For at the end of the day, a writer I absolutely respect and enjoy often answers the questions in the epigraph that began these brief notes quite simply: nowhere.

[1] “Honey, Drop the Knife,” Blanket Warm (Omaha: Lumber Jack Records, 1996).

[2] DFW hereafter.*

*On a side-note: a brief perusal of The Hyperarchival Parallax will quickly reveal that I am quite footnote-happy, a clear indication of a gratuitous and acknowledged influence by one DFW, so it should probably come as no surprise whatsoever that I am heavily reading him right now for various projects.  This is an influence I’m clearly aware of, to the extent that I am more footnote-happy than DFW ever was, and he is an influence I’m not terribly concerned about having one way or the other.  As Tomaž Šalamun once told me in personal conversation, “It is important to have fathers.  DFW is clearly your father.  Do not shy away from this” (paraphrase; also of note: I was getting a poetry degree. . .).  I cannot quite recall who Tomaž said his father was (perhaps Pessoa or Milosz or Ashbery), but it really could have been any of the (dauntingly-)numerous poets he knew, loved, recommended, etc.  He was a sheer encyclopedia of generous appreciation and warmth re: pretty much anyone who scribbled poesy, so I suppose it could have been a mish-mash of people.  Not even to really mention what Harold Bloom said in The Anxiety of Influence—for surely pretty much any writing-like-undertaking is anxiety-producing—but influence is not necessarily a bad thing, and in fact one to (perhaps) be embraced (at times).  (I’m like the early Cave-In: I wear my [one] influence on my sleeve.)

[3] I owe the easy acquiring of a complete set of bibliographic links to the quite fantastic The Howling Fantods, the site perhaps attending the most carefully and encyclopedically to anything re: DFW.

[4] For instance Lyndon Baines Johnson and “Lady Bird” Johnson in “Lyndon” (The Girl with Curious Hair [New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1989], 75-118).

[5] See “Solomon Silverfish,” Sonora Review 16 (Fall 1987), 54-81.

[6] The Girl with Curious Hair, 173-201.

[7] ibid., 201, emphases mine.

[8] ibid., 188.

[9] You know, those certain people you’ve never heard get sincerely exited about, well, pretty much anything?