David Foster Wallace and "The Long Thing"

New Essays on the Novels

Marshall Boswell

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781628928006
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

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.

Part One

Wallace as Novelist

1

David Foster Wallace and the Novel of Ideas

Adam Kelly

If there do exist such things as novelists of ideas, then David Foster Wallace was surely one. To begin with the obvious, Wallace’s novels consistently show specific ideas wielding formative dramatic power in the minds of principal characters. In The Broom of the System (1987), Lenore Beadsman fears that she is no more than a linguistic construct, a character in a novel. In Infinite Jest (1996), Don Gately commits to praying to a Higher Power of which he cannot conceive, but which mysteriously enables his recovery. In The Pale King (2011), Chris Fogle’s life is changed by a series of insights into the nature of freedom, which turn him from “wastoid” into self-contented tax accountant. But ideas do not shape only the minds of these characters: the very fictional worlds they inhabit have themselves been constructed through Wallace’s close engagement with abstract ideas—logical, political, historical—that are made concrete in the linguistic registers and plot dynamics of his novels. It is this second mode of engagement with ideas that makes Wallace an unusual figure in the modern American literary tradition, at least as that tradition has often been characterized. Philip Rahv, in perhaps the most influential statement on this theme, chastised American authors in “The Cult of Experience in American Writing” (1940) for their “unique indifference . . . to ideas generally, to theories of value, to the wit of the speculative and problematical” (360). With Henry James as chief culprit, modern American fiction, according to Rahv, always privileges psychology over philosophy, and ideas are commonly portrayed by American writers in ways that make them wholly subservient to their dramatic role in the mind, sensibility and experience of the character thinking them. While the first mode of Wallace’s engagement with ideas described above could potentially conform to Rahv’s characterization, the second could not. One of Wallace’s innovations was therefore to insist on the centrality of ideas, and especially of abstract structures that transcend the individual’s psychology, to “the art of the novel,” in James’s own much-cited phrase.¹

Equally important is the fact that the particular sets of ideas that underpin Wallace’s novels changed and developed over the course of his career. This is something thus far under-acknowledged in the published criticism on his fiction, which has tended either to treat an individual work—most often Infinite Jest—in isolation, or to reduce Wallace’s ideas to a set of tenets drawn mainly from what I have referred to elsewhere as the “essay-interview nexus,” namely Wallace’s essay “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction” and his interview with Larry McCaffery, texts paired together in a 1993 issue of The Review of Contemporary Fiction (Kelly, “Death of the Author”). This tendency among critics to prioritize Wallace’s early-career statements on his artistic practice is certainly understandable, as Wallace was from the beginning a provocative literary critic and sociologist as well as an artist. In particular, his revisionist reading of American metafiction in those early critical statements would prove highly influential, making it henceforth difficult to regard the landscape of postwar US fiction and the phenomenon of literary postmodernism in ways that ignored Wallace’s powerful reconstruction of the field.² Equally, the critical focus on Infinite Jest makes eminent sense, so rich is that novel’s engagement with contemporary culture and the literary tradition. But with the publication of his unfinished novel The Pale King in 2011, along with the appearance of a first biography and the opening of his archive at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas-Austin, scholars of Wallace’s fiction have been presented with a fairly comprehensive overview of his trajectory as an artist and novelist over the course of a two-decade career. At the same time—and as the present volume attests—the study of Wallace’s work is reaching a point of critical mass at which it should no longer be necessary to argue for Wallace’s place in the literary canon by attempting to encapsulate his various ideas with reference to a single key text or set of unchanging principles.

In this essay, I will examine Wallace’s development as a writer with reference to the ideas that shape his novels. I will argue that those novels can be read in dialogue with one another, with each novel addressing conceptual questions remaining behind from the novel before. To make this broad task manageable, I will structure the essay around a comparison of three key scenes of dialogue within the novels themselves: the conversation between LaVache and Lenore Beadsman on an Amherst hill in The Broom of the System; the Rémy Marathe-Hugh Steeply dialogue atop an Arizona mountain in Infinite Jest; and the multi-character debate that takes place in an elevator in §19 of The Pale King. Considering these three examples together, what is immediately noteworthy is the importance of physical elevation in those scenes in Wallace’s novels that address wider thematic concerns through dialogue. It is as if such elevation allows the characters a survey of the territory, which in turn permits the consideration of more abstract or “elevated” ideas in each novel. But the other important characteristic of these scenes is precisely that they are dialogues, and I will begin with a treatment of this point. Wallace’s heavy reliance on scenes of dialogue between characters as a means of exploring structuring ideas was an aspect of his fiction that remained consistent, though not entirely unchanging, over the course of his writing career.³

Dialogic dialogue

In a mundane sense, of course, dialogue is a common aspect of almost all fiction, so there is nothing remarkable about the fact that Wallace makes substantial use of it. Nevertheless, there are noteworthy reasons for its extensive prominence in important strands of his novels. For one thing, passages of dialogue provide Wallace with potential relief from the dominance of his own distinctive narrative voice. Wallace’s uncanny ear for American speech, speech usually presented in a slightly exaggerated yet recognizably realistic manner in his dialogues, often allows him to undermine the habituation of his characteristic prose rhythms. That Wallace became increasingly concerned about the overbearing quality of his “self-consciously maximalist style” of narration is suggested by D. T. Max (50), and it is an anxiety likewise indicated by Wallace’s experimentation with pseudonyms in his post-Infinite Jest work, whether in submitting his story “Mister Squishy” to McSweeney’s under the pen-name Elizabeth Klemm, or in inventing interlocutors in “Big Red Son” and publishing the essay “bi-pseudonymously” (as he puts in on the copyright page of Consider the Lobster). More importantly, by bringing a range of voices into his texts, Wallace can also make those texts a forum for competing ideas, and can explore these ideas in a dialogic context. There are a number of influential models for this practice in literary and philosophical history: among those discussed to date in relation to Wallace are William Gaddis’s unattributed dialogue, where a lack of contextual description forces the reader to imaginatively intervene in constructing a scene, and the Wittgenstein of the Philosophical Investigations, who explores logic as a language game involving more than one voice.⁴

While acknowledging the importance of these influences, I want to highlight here the relevance to Wallace’s work of two other models of dialogue—the Socratic and the Dostoevskian—with reference to their characterization in the work of Mikhail Bakhtin. In Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, Bakhtin distinguishes between forms of speech that seek to embody prior truth and persuade others of the validity of that truth—Bakhtin calls this the rhetorical or monologic speech genre—and forms of speech that emphasize responsivity and open communication with others in the joint pursuit of truth—Bakhtin usually calls this dialogism.⁵ “The dialogic means of seeking truth,” as he puts it, “is counterposed to official monologism, which pretends to possess a ready-made truth” (110). Bakhtin clarifies this opposition between the dialogic and the monologic through a comparison between the early and late Socratic dialogues of Plato. The early dialogues are constructed on the assumption that “[t]ruth is not born nor is it to be found inside the head of an individual person, it is born between people collectively searching for truth, in the process of their dialogic interaction” (110). In Bakthin’s view, this conception of truth-seeking is organic to the genre of the dialogue itself, and Socrates remains a participant in the process rather than a teacher. In the later Platonic dialogues, by contrast, Socrates has become the teacherly fount of truth and wisdom, and “the monologism of the content begins to destroy the form of the Socratic dialogue” (110). These later dialogues correspond to Aristotelian ideas of rhetoric as logical persuasion, which shore up the monologic notion of truth as existing prior to the interaction between interlocutors.

This monologic conception of truth has been the dominant one since ancient times, underlying the worldviews of religion, philosophy and modern science, but it does find itself challenged at particular moments in history. One such challenge comes with Dostoevsky’s “polyphonic” novel, which Bakhtin calls “an entirely new type of artistic thinking” (3). Here written dialogue is used not only to portray the openness of truth-seeking between characters, but also to show how a character can challenge the truth embodied by the novel’s author, thus remaining “ideologically authoritative and independent” (5), unpredictable and free in a radical way. This has an impact in turn on how ideas are negotiated in the novels, because “[t]he polyphonic project is incompatible with a mono-ideational framework of the ordinary sort” (78). What Bakhtin means by this is that ideas emerge in Dostoevsky’s work through characters who do not simply embody aspects of the author’s own ideological beliefs, beliefs which exist apart from the work. Instead, Dostoevsky’s characters are themselves involved in internal and external dialogues regarding ideas, which are never finalized into a single truth. “Dostoevsky was capable of representing someone else’s idea, preserving its full capacity to signify as an idea,” Bakthin writes, “while at the same time also preserving a distance, neither confirming the idea nor merging it with his own expressed ideology” (85). But this happens only when characters are convincingly rendered as thinking, self-conscious beings: “the idea itself can preserve its power to mean, its full integrity as an idea, only when self-consciousness is the dominant in the artistic representation of the hero” (79). In order to preserve this process, self-consciousness in Dostoevsky never resolves itself into a unity, regardless of how inward-looking his characters can be. Instead, “[a] character’s self-consciousness in Dostoevsky is thoroughly dialogized: in its every aspect it is turned outward, intensely addressing itself, another, a third person” (251).

At first blush, David Foster Wallace’s fiction appears similar to this Dostoevskian model, with Wallace’s self-conscious characters shown to be prone to internal division and constantly engaged in dialogue with themselves and with others. But Wallace adds an extra element to the mix, which rests in the anticipatory anxiety his characters feel when addressing others. Speakers in Wallace’s fiction are often depicted as desperate for genuine reciprocal dialogue, but find that their overwhelming need to predict in advance the other’s response blocks the possibility of finding the language to get outside themselves and truly reach out to the other.⁶ In the shadow of such anxiety of anticipation, the difficulty of generating reciprocal dialogue means that the stakes are heightened in those scenes in Wallace’s novels where two characters do exchange ideas through dialogue. When this process becomes genuinely dialogic in Bakhtin’s sense—when truth appears to be generated “between people”—something important has occurred in Wallace’s ethical world: the means have become the ends. “It is fully understandable,” writes Bakhtin, “that at the center of Dostoevsky’s artistic world must lie dialogue, and dialogue not as a means but as an end in itself” (252). This notion of dialogue as an end in itself connects to Wallace’s view, stated to McCaffery and repeated on many later occasions, that “what makes good fiction sort of magical” is the way the separate agendas of reader and writer can be mediated “by the fact that language and linguistic intercourse is, in and of itself, redeeming, remedy-ing” (CW 32–3). As we know from his own essay on Dostoevsky, Wallace deeply admired the “morally passionate, passionately moral fiction” produced by the Russian writer (CL 274). The negotiation with ideas that happens in his own novels thus owes a debt to the techniques developed by Dostoevsky, and especially to the value the latter places on the redeeming event of dialogue itself.⁷

Broom logic

Viewed in Bakhtinian terms, however, The Broom of the System, Wallace’s debut novel, is characterized by the overwhelmingly monologic nature of its dialogue. This is exemplified by the scenes between Rick Vigorous and Lenore Beadsman, where Rick’s voice dominates through his lengthy storytelling and his repeated wish to absorb and possess Lenore according to a fixed ontology of self and other. Similarly, the scenes between Rick or Lenore and Dr Curtis Jay are also monologic, in that Jay subsumes everything his patients tell him to an already formed hermeneutic theory of truth drawn from the writings of his imagined mentor Dr Blentner. This monologism is presented parodically by Wallace, of course, in line with what Patrick O’Donnell identifies as the novel’s debt to the genre of Menippean satire (8).⁸ But what makes The Broom of the System monologic in a more fundamental sense is the way the novel is constructed with reference to the ideas of philosophical logic itself.

To highlight this feature of Broom, I will examine aspects of the scene of dialogue between Lenore and her brother LaVache that takes place on a hill in Amherst College. This scene is significant for a number of structural reasons: it is the final scene of the novel’s longest chapter, the 11th chapter of 21; it is the scene that brings to an end part one of a two-part novel; and it is the scene in which the problems Lenore is experiencing regarding her identity are most clearly explained to her and to the reader. LaVache’s explanation runs as follows:

[Gramma] Lenore has you believing, with your complicity, circumstantially speaking, that you’re not really real, or that you’re only real insofar as you’re told about, so that to the extent that you’re real you’re controlled, and thus not in control, so that you’re more like a sort of character than a person, really—and of course Lenore would say the two are the same, now, wouldn’t she? (BOS 249)

As convoluted as it may sound out of context, LaVache’s explanation of this paradox arrives as a clarifying moment in the text for Lenore (and for the reader). Nevertheless it does not, and cannot, solve Lenore’s problem, precisely because of the form it takes as an explanation. Lenore’s reply makes this evident: “ ‘How about if we just sp...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Part 1 Wallace as Novelist
• Part II The Novels
• Works Cited
• Notes on Contributors
• Index