David Foster Wallace: Fiction and Form

David Hering

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781628920574
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In David Foster Wallace: Fiction and Form, David Hering analyses the structures of David Foster Wallace's fiction, from his debut The Broom of the System to his final unfinished novel The Pale King. Incorporating extensive analysis of Wallace's drafts, notes and letters, and taking account of the rapidly expanding field of Wallace scholarship, this book argues that the form of Wallace's fiction is always inextricably bound up within an ongoing conflict between the monologic and the dialogic, one strongly connected with Wallace's sense of his own authorial presence and identity in the work. Hering suggests that this conflict occurs at the level of both subject and composition, analysing the importance of a number of provocative structural and critical contexts – ghostliness, institutionality, reflection – to the fiction while describing how this argument is also visible within the development of Wallace's manuscripts, comparing early drafts with published material to offer a career-long framework of the construction of Wallace's fiction. The final chapter offers an unprecedentedly detailed analysis of the troubled, decade-long construction of the work that became The Pale King.

1

Vocality

‘A Flickering Hand, Dead and Cold’: Reading Wallace’s Ghosts

David Foster Wallace, establishing the importance of ‘mediated data’ to his writing, explains that his use of form is intended to disrupt the reader’s ‘passive spectation’, reminding the reader that ‘this process is a relationship between the writer’s consciousness and her own’. He argues that ‘this might be my best response to [the] claim that my stuff’s not “realistic” […] the classical Realist form is soothing, familiar and anaesthetic; it drops us right into spectation’ (‘Interview with Larry McCaffery’ 33–4). In this instance, Wallace is referring to distortion of linearity and perspective, and by extension the reader’s awareness of the presence of the ‘writer’s consciousness’, but this disavowal of realism also extends beyond structural disruption and into jarring non-realist occurrences at the level of story. These eruptions range from the bodily (the gargantuan Norman Bombardini in The Broom of the System, Tom Sternberg’s inward-facing eye in ‘Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way’, the levitating Shane Drinion in The Pale King) to the geographical (Broom’s Great Ohio Desert, the hyper-real endless Midwest of ‘Westward’, Infinite Jest’s Great Concavity/Convexity). However, both the structural foregrounding of the ‘writer’s consciousness’ and the non-realist story event are synthesized through another formal motif developed by Wallace across his fiction: the figure of the ghost.

To read the function of the multifaceted ghost-figures in Wallace’s fiction is to participate in an often problematic developmental relationship between writer and reader that operates in terms of what Wallace refers to, in conversation with McCaffery, as ‘a living transaction between humans’ (41). The synthesis of the supernatural and narrative self-reflexivity is, of course, not peculiar to contemporary literature. Terry Castle’s argument, respecting certain iterations of modernist literature, that ‘[we have come] increasingly to believe, as if through a kind of epistemological recoil, in the spectral nature of our own thoughts – to figure imaginative activity itself, paradoxically, as a kind of ghost-seeing’ (29) and Yeats’ belief that ghosts ‘have bodies as plastic as their minds that flow so readily into the mould of ours’ (‘Swedenborg’ 35) remind us of the importance of this synthesis to late Victorian and modernist literatures. However, the epistemological modernist association of the dead and the creative imagination, which was informed in part by the pseudo-scientism of the séance and spirit mediumship of the era,¹ can also be read as a precursor to postmodern ontological preoccupations with the pastiche of pre-existing ‘dead’ styles and the resurrection of ‘used-upness’ (Barth, Friday 64) as a replenishment of literature.² In his engagement with postmodern enquiries, Wallace’s fiction retains the motif of the ghostly ‘apparition’ as a way of explicitly disrupting narrative authority.

Wallace, who wrote his first major works in the 1980s, was continually faced with the ramifications of theoretical discourse upon the form of the novel itself. The question of authorial effacement haunted the academic environments within which Wallace thrived, as the integration of post-structuralist theory into academy syllabi, most famously Roland Barthes’ seminal ‘ “The Death of the Author” ’, interrogated the ontology of the author’s presence in the text. In his 1988 essay ‘Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young’, Wallace claims that ‘the climate for the “next” generation of American writers […] is aswirl with what seems like long-overdue appreciation for the weird achievements of such aliens as […] Barthes’, arguing that ‘the idea that literary language is any kind of neutral medium for the transfer […] from artist to audience […] has been cast into rich and serious question’ (Both 63–4).

Four years later, Wallace makes a more vexed pronouncement on the post-Barthesian author figure in a 1992 review of H.L. Hix’s Morte D’Author, glossing the post-structuralist effacement of the author as an attack on ‘a post-Platonic prejudice in favour of presence over absence and speech over writing’ (Supposedly 140) before offering a tantalizingly brief rebuttal in the final lines of the review on behalf of ‘those of us civilians who know in our gut that writing is an act of communication between one human being and another’ (144). In this implicit alignment with ‘civilians’, Wallace seeks, perhaps disingenuously, to position himself outside the ‘ghastly jargon’ (144) of the academy. In this sense, he belongs to the generation identified by Judith Ryan as ‘troubled by the implications of theory for contemporary life’ (208), but it is clear that he remains familiar with and influenced by the question of authorial effacement. The following year, he concedes to Larry McCaffery that ‘once I’m done with the thing, I’m basically dead, and probably the text’s dead; it becomes simply language, and language lives not just in but “through” the reader’ (40).³

I believe that this oscillatory position is continually dramatized within Wallace’s fiction through a fixation on the author’s dialogic relationship with the reader, which is enacted through dramatized instances of ‘possession’ and ghostliness that implicitly refer to the absence or presence of the dead, among whom can be found the ‘spectral’ figure of the author. In staging this dramatization, Wallace practises what Benjamin Widiss describes as ‘a continual rehearsal of Barthes’ claims, but never an affirmation of them’ (5). Widiss argues that the critical assumption of the steady effacement of authorial presence that developed as a response to modernism, an assumption that finds its apotheosis in Barthes’ essay, is inaccurate, suggesting that ‘only the most radically chance-driven works … prove so eager to shed all authorial design’ (6). Widiss reads Barthes’ author/scriptor binary as a false dichotomy, desiring instead to more subtly ‘read the troping of a pervasive textual praxis of solicitation when it is not represented as explicit importuning’ (17). Wallace’s fiction, I would suggest, practises this implicit ‘solicitation’ but diverges from Widiss’ rejection of post-structural authorial effacement in its recognition of Barthes’ essay as a necessary moment of importance in literary history.

In Wallace’s fiction, authorial presence is often implicitly amplified as a way of commenting upon its effacement, with specific recourse to motifs of vocality and dialogue. This is staged by Wallace through a reification of Barthes’ question ‘Who is speaking thus?’ (Image Music Text 142), his fiction populated with multiple and competing indiscernible voices which originate from powerful absent and often ghostly figures. Over time, Wallace imbricates these presences with increasingly visible iterations of the revenant author figure, and an attendant focus on the importance of dialogue with both character and reader. I read this as a process of developing materiality, with Wallace performing a vexed dramatization of Barthes’ claims before obtaining a situation in the later fiction whereby the ‘revenant’ author, who has undergone his theoretical ‘death’, returns as a modified, and sometimes explicitly curatorial, textual presence. I do not read the revenant author as a direct ‘revival’ of the pre-Barthesian author figure, but rather a ‘ghostly’ return of the dead author, one aware of his existential contingency upon readerly presence and interpretation and committed to a dialogic engagement with those readers.⁴

As part of this process, I read Wallace as entering into a connected dialogue with two further models of authorial anxiety: Harold Bloom’s ghostly inflected model of apophrades and Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of dialogism and polyphony. Apophrades, whereby ‘the mighty dead return, but they return in our colours, and speaking in our voices, at least in part, at least in moments, moments that testify to our persistence, and not to their own’ is a form of misprision whereby the ‘very strongest’ poets achieve ‘a style that captures and oddly retains priority over their precursors, so that the tyranny of time almost is overturned, and one can believe, for startled moments, that they are being imitated by their ancestors’ (Bloom 141, emphasis original). However, as Charles Harris has acutely argued, ‘the strong precursors Wallace was driven to overtake [also] include himself’ (120), and I believe this is borne out by the steadily increased presence of an implied author figure across Wallace’s fiction.⁵

This presence is also implemented in accordance with an understanding of dialogism as described by Mikhail Bakhtin, who is name-checked by Wallace in ‘Fictional Futures’ in the same list in which he includes Barthes. Marshall Boswell reads Wallace’s approach to the death of the author directly via the Morte D’Author review, in which Wallace praises the way that Hix ‘amends Derrida by way of Wittgenstein’ (Boswell, Understanding 171). While I agree that this can be a useful approach to the early fiction, I believe that reading Wallace in relation to Bakhtin provides a sustained career-length model by which to map the problems of authorial monologism staged by the motifs of possession and ghostliness in the fiction. In his famous analysis of Dostoevsky’s polyphonic method, Bakhtin analyses the manner in which the ‘monologic plane of the novel’ is destroyed by the character as ‘fully autonomous carrier of his own individual world’ (Bakhtin, Problems 5). Bakhtin praises Dostoevsky’s narratives as ‘a whole formed by the interaction of several consciousnesses, none of which entirely becomes an object for the other’ (18), resulting in ‘free people, capable of standing alongside their creator’ (6, emphasis original). In concluding this chapter, I argue that Bakhtin’s concept of polyphony and dialogism offers an important model through which to read Wallace’s spectral response to the effacement, and possible return, of the author figure.

Tracing Possession, Ghosts and Materiality in the Fiction

The narrative of Wallace’s debut The Broom of the System does not make explicit recourse to the supernatural, but the novel retains a preoccupation with uncanny occurrences and the prescriptive authority of unseen forces. Broom’s plot is driven by the disappearance of a linchpin family figure: Lenore Beadsman’s great-grandmother, also named Lenore, whose whereabouts are not conclusively addressed, but who exerts control over events from her unknown hiding place. The linguistic influence of ‘Gramma’, a student of Wittgenstein, on Lenore manifests as extreme ontological uncertainty, evidenced by her conversation with psychiatrist Dr Jay:

Suppose Gramma tells me really convincingly that all that really exists of my life is what can be said about it? […] that there’s nothing going on with me that isn’t either told or tellable, and if so, what’s the difference, why live at all? (Broom 119)

Lenore’s appeal is complicated by the fact that Dr Jay himself is under the control of Gramma, his apparently disinterested responses informed by the same authority that has initiated Lenore’s existential crisis. The novel is littered with numerous minor examples of narrative or linguistic possession connected to Gramma’s absent influence. For example, Lenore’s lover Rick Vigorous is open about his desire to control her, explicitly stating, ‘I am possessive. I want to own her, sometimes’ (72). Rick’s possessiveness, however, is inflected by Gramma’s disappearance: he knows that his controlling nature ‘does not sit well with a girl thoroughly frightened of the possibility that she does not own herself’ (72). Rick’s desire to possess Lenore subsequently manifests itself covertly and metafictionally in his own pseudonymous short stories (191). Furthermore, the sudden ‘parroting’ vocal articulacy of Lenore’s cockatiel Vlad the Impaler, which is interpreted by Reverend Sykes as ‘the voice of the Lord’ (275), is actually due to his ingestion of the pineal supplement partially masterminded by Gramma (148–9). Gramma, the earliest iteration of a figure I will term the ‘absent possessor’, is also a site of generational anxiety, as it is possible to locate behind Gramma the presence of another absent possessor: Wittgenstein himself, whose influence on Wallace’s writing was profound.⁶ However, despite Gramma’s substantial level of narrative control, her own voice does not directly appear in the novel.

A number of stories in Wallace’s first short story collection Girl with Curious Hair develop the motifs of possession from his first novel. This process involves a deliberate transposition of the ‘parroting’ found in the plot of Broom to the narrative registers of the stories themselves. Girl with Curious Hair can usefully, if a little reductively, be read as Wallace’s parroting of the register of several preceding and contemporary writers. Wallace imitates and parodies the narratives of Bret Easton Ellis (‘Girl with Curious Hair’), Robert Coover (‘Lyndon’), William Gass (‘John Billy’), Philip Roth (‘Say Never’) and finally John Barth (‘Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way’).⁷ While this technique can come across as more than a little obnoxious (Wallace himself later referred to it rather dismissively as ‘formal stunt-pilotry’ [‘Interview with Larry McCaffery’ 25]), the sequence of stories describe a slow convergence whereby the implicit mimicry of existing authorial styles builds towards a climactic ‘breaking out’ of the implied author in the death-of-metafiction fable ‘Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way.’ This concluding story, operating as an ‘Armageddon explosion’ for the form, engenders a new approach to authorial presence in Wallace’s writing (41). It is therefore possible to see Girl with Curious Hair as an iteration of Bloom’s apophrades whereby Wallace deliberately tries to force his predecessors (as well as his contemporaries) to speak in his own voice: a methodology more aggressive than Bloom’s ‘holding open’ of the work to the predecessor, and nakedly, deliberately artificial in its mimicry.

If Wallace’s register throughout the collection often acts as a kind of low-level ‘possession’ of certain contemporary writers, the leitmotifs of ontological anxiety from The Broom of the System appear in a rather more restless and explicitly metafictional form. In ‘Here and There’, Bruce, who wants to be the ‘first really great poet of technology’ (Girl 155), articulates the basis of his anxiety about his identity thus:

I begin to feel as though my thoughts and voice here are in some way the creative products of something outside of me, not in my control, and yet that this shaping, determining influence outside me is still me. I feel a division which the outside voice posits as the labor pain of a nascent emotional conscience. I am invested with an urge to ‘write it all out’, to confront the past and present as a community of signs, but this requires a special distance I seem to have left behind. For a few days I exercise instead […] my aunt is happy; she says I look healthy. I take the cotton bud out of my ear. (Girl 165–6)

This is an important passage, as it refers back to the kind of control anxiety experienced by Lenore but couches it in terms more explicitly concerned with writing. Indeed, the pointed addition of certain lines about ‘fiction therapy’ during the drafting of ‘Here and There’ (Box 1.1, Bonnie Nadell) suggests that Wallace wanted to further foreground an association between the sense of being externally controlled or possessed, and the question of ‘writing out’ as a possible solution, albeit one that is temporarily superseded by an un-self-conscious activity like exercise. Notably, the possessive force here is identified directly with the self (‘still me’), rather than an external character, suggesting an immobilizing alignment of the possessor and the possessed. Accordingly, the story ends with Bruce paralysed with self-doubt while fixing a stove. While ‘Here and There’ ends with a line that describes tentative resolve and acceptance (‘Then welcome’ [172]), Wallace’s original ending to the story is somewhat different:

‘Which brings things to a close, then’

‘So to speak’. (Box 15.1)⁸

The final line here can be read alternately as in dialogue with the one that precedes it or as a monologic non-sequiter whereby Bruce prepares to articulate himself regardless of the ‘close’ of the story, and that the paralysing conversation with himself will continue despite the attempts of others to resolve his anxious predicament. The revised and published version of ‘Here and There’ suggests that the anxiety felt by Bruce can only be met by an unconditional act of dialogic communication (a ‘welcome’), and that by affording another the final word Bruce’s authority is subsumed into a dialogical narrative. If the original ending recalls the verge-of-annunciation climax of Broom (‘I’m a man of my’ [Broom 467]), the published version suggests that an acceptance of the authority of another’s voice can resolve anxiety about loss of control to others.

However, the implication that one must subsume one’s own voice within a larger dialogue in order to ameliorate anxiety remains ambiguously phrased here, oscillating between the possibility of a harmonious amalgamation of voices or subjugation to a larger narrative authority and loss of one’s voice, which Bruce fears. Elsewhere in the collection this oscillation results in a less harmonious outcome. While Bruce’s agitated episode is bookended by him inserting and removing a cotton bud from his ear, Edilyn, the female protagonist of ‘My Appearance’ wears an unpleasantly ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents 
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Vocality: ‘A Flickering Hand, Dead and Cold’: Reading Wallace’s Ghosts
• 2. Spatiality: ‘In the Middle of the Middle of Nowhere’: Regionalism and Institutions
• 3. Visuality: ‘Seeing by Mirror-Light’: Wallace on Reflection
• 4. Finality: ‘Not Even Close to Complete’: The Many Forms of The Pale King
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index
• Imprint