Bradley J. Fest

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ReviewsBRADLEY J. FESTConsider David Foster Wallace: Critical Essaysedited by David HeringSideshow Media Group Press, 2010, 242 pp., ISBN 978-0-9761465-7-5At the moment it is difficult to predict what David Foster Wallace’slegacy might be among literary critics, but since his suicide inSeptember of 2008 his writing has received considerable attention.This is not to suggest that he was unappreciated during his lifetime –the reception of Infinite Jest (1996) had a rock-star-like quality – but, asso often happens with the untimely passing of a notable cultural figure,the importance of reading Wallace has become paramount for manysince his death. There are clear reasons for this, but perhaps thesimplest one is that Wallace has been understood, for nearly twodecades now, as the next ‘big thing’ in American literature. Even beforeMarshall Boswell’s influential study Understanding David Foster Wallace(2003), he was viewed as the successor to Thomas Pynchon, WilliamGaddis, Robert Coover, John Barth, and others. For his critics and fans,Wallace was both the heir apparent to the giants of literarypostmodernism and the next aesthetic step forward in US fiction.The passing of such a figure has consequently caused a significantamount of new attention to be paid to his work.Until now, the majority of Wallace criticism has addressed his use ofirony – or rather, his meta-ironic reversals of postmodern metafictionalstaples mobilised in an effort to achieve a form of new ‘post-ironic’sincerity. This sincerity has been characterised as striving, albeitunsuccessfully, to break through the insurmountable and solipsisticcommunication gap between self and other. Though there are a fewexceptions to this generalisation, notably in early articles by TomLeClair (1996) and N. Katherine Hayles (1999), Wallace criticism hasfocused at times almost exclusively on comments regarding irony andsincerity that he made in a special edition of the Review of ContemporaryFiction in 1993. In that issue, Wallace published what was to becomeone of the most important literary manifestos of the 1990s, ‘E UnibusPluram’, and also gave a lengthy interview to Larry McCaffery. Wallaceemphasised the wholesale appropriation by the culture industry ofwhat he called ‘postmodern irony’, specifically in the minimalist novelsof the mid 1980s and in televisual culture more generally. In response tothis, he predicted that a new generation of sincere writers wouldemerge out of the hip, cynical, postmodern malaise of the 1990s.Indeed, ‘E Unibus Pluram’ is as incontestably important for readingWallace as T. S. Eliot’s ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, HenryJames’s ‘The Art of Fiction’, or John Barth’s ‘The Literature of Exhaustion’are for those writers, but on the whole, Wallace critics have limited theirattention to such a prodigious, encyclopaedic, and theoretically rigorouswriter only to what he has said about literature. Combating this criticaloversimplification of Wallace’s work, Consider David Foster Wallace:Critical Essays proposes firmly establishing the field of Wallace studiesby forging new and unexplored paths away from the now stock-in-tradediscussions of Wallace’s irony and sincerity.Occasioned by the first international conference devoted to Wallace,which was held in Liverpool, England, in 2009, Consider David FosterWallace, the first volume of critical essays addressing his work, ismaking a timely appearance. In the two years since Wallace’s death, atleast three journals have devoted considerable space to memorialisinghim; a subsequent Wallace conference was held in November 2009 atCUNY (City University of New York); an important retrospective piecein the New Yorker appeared by D. T. Max; and an interview with DavidLipsky was recently published by Broadway Books. Three posthumousworks by Wallace are also expected: his undergraduate thesis, Fate,Time, and Language, his unfinished final novel, The Pale King, and avolume of his uncollected short stories and nonfiction. And inSeptember 2010 the University of Texas opened the David FosterWallace Archive at the Harry Ransom Center for Research in the Artsand Humanities. With all the recent attention Wallace has received,editor David Hering’s opening sentence of Consider seems incontest-able: ‘And but [sic] so we come to the commencement of what Isuppose we should call Wallace Studies’ (p. 9).Greg Carlisle, author of Elegant Complexity (2007), a study of InfiniteJest, introduces Consider by making an impassioned case for the need toestablish such a field of study. Not only do scholars have to ‘figure outhow to get Wallace taught in more classrooms’ (p. 20), he writes, butalso ‘we need to start generating more print resources as well. [. . .] Weshould collect Wallace’s interviews, too. We should collect the best ofwhat is online and in print format, too. Finally, we should have aWallace Quarterly. It is not too soon to have this’ (p. 22). Though it isdifficult to disagree with him, Carlisle’s case is diminished by a certainlack of critical rigour. His main arguments regarding Wallace’srelevance and the need to establish a field of Wallace studies are: ‘ThisReviews: English and film 103is his value: he creates work for the reader that is fun and challenging,and he makes you want to research and explore’ (p. 15); and he is ‘themost important author of the late [twentieth] and early [twenty-first]centuries. I think a world in which Wallace is a household name wouldbe a more mindful, passionate, and compassionate world’ (p. 20). Theconversational tone of the introduction may result from the fact that itwas delivered as a keynote address, but for what amounts to theinaugural publication of Wallace studies, Carlisle’s introductioninsufficiently makes the case for the need to establish such a field.Most of the rest of the essays in Consider, however, commendably domake this case. Of especial note is Adam Kelly’s ‘David Foster Wallaceand the New Sincerity in American Fiction’. Significantly, this is theonly chapter in Consider devoted to the topic of sincerity. In it, Kellyeffectively intervenes in the commonplace critical approach to Wallaceby establishing a solid and theoretically complex ground for adiscussion of sincerity by utilising Lionel Trilling’s Sincerity andAuthenticity (1972) and the work of Jacques Derrida to ‘suggest . . .that Wallace’s project ended up even more far-reaching than he claimedit would be in that key early essay, and that from Infinite Jest onward itbecame primarily about returning to literary narrative a concern withsincerity not seen since modernism shifted the ground so fundamen-tally almost a century before’ (p. 133). Kelly’s essay stands out becauseit extends and complicates how Wallace’s sincerity can be read, anddoes so through an awareness of the intellectual milieu that bothinfluenced Wallace and weighed heavily on him throughout his life:‘sincerity has the same structure as the gift: it can always be taken formanipulation, and this risk is fundamental – it cannot be reduced byappeal to intention, or morality, or context – because true sincerity, ifthere is ever such a thing, must take place in the aporia between theconditional and unconditional’ (p. 140).The rest of the essays in Consider depart considerably from previousWallace criticism, and the novelty of the collection is established in itsfirst essay, where Clare Hayes-Brady draws attention to the previouslyunnoticed importance of the thinking of Paul Ricoeur and RichardRorty in philosophically grounding Wallace’s project. In ‘The Book, theBroom and the Ladder’ she argues that through this philosophicalgrounding, Wallace’s first novel, The Broom of the System, ‘deserves to beconsidered not as the juvenilia of a potentially talented author, but asthe self-assured declaration of an artistic and philosophical project thatwould give rise not just to an impressive career, but also to a rebirth ofAmerican fiction’ (p. 36).Several other essays stand out in Consider. Graham Foster’s ‘ABlasted Region: David Foster Wallace’s Man-made Landscapes’104 Critical Quarterly, vol. 53, no. 2rectifies the conspicuously absent discussion so far of landscape inWallace’s work by emphasising its relationship to Leo Marx’s seminalstudy The Machine in the Garden (1964). Connie Luther and PhilipColeman offer new ways into Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Waythat go beyond simply stressing the novella’s relationship to Barth’s Lostin the Funhouse. In particular, Luther begins the very necessaryconversation of how to understand Wallace’s work with regard to latecapitalism by noting its affinities with Fredric Jameson’s account ofpostmodernism. ‘‘‘Yet Another Example of the Porousness of CertainBorders’’: Chaos and Realism in Infinite Jest’ by Kiki Benzon alsoadmirably takes up the subject of his engagement with culturalformations specific to the ‘contours of the late-capitalist environment’(p. 101). Drawing upon his own conception of ‘radical realism’ fromInfinite Jest, she argues that ‘Infinite Jest affirms that the perpetual,fundamental tension between order and disorder is precisely where‘‘the real’’ resides’ (p. 112). David Hering’s ‘Infinite Jest: Triangles,Cycles, Choices and Chases’ discerns how Infinite Jest’s structure – interms of both its narrative and its presentation of topological space – isbased on the fractal known as the Sierpinski Gasket. In terms ofunexplored terrain in Wallace’s work, Hering’s intervention ispotentially the most interesting in the collection, for it points to thefact that literary critics must take quite seriously Wallace’s early trainingin formal logic as well as his interest in transfinite mathematics.Though perhaps less important for more general discussions ofWallace, the other essays in Consider highlight the sheer multitude ofarenas he explored in his substantial body of work, and consequentlyhow diverse any field of Wallace studies will necessarily have to be toengage the many facets of his writing. For instance, Gregory Phippsengages with the role athletics play in Wallace’s work, ChristopherThomas addresses the obvious influence of Laurence Stern’s TristramShandy on Infinite Jest, Iannis Goerlandt begins what promises to be afruitful study of how annotation and footnotes function in his shorterfiction and nonfiction, while Paul Jenner takes up his encounter withJohn McCain’s 2000 presidential campaign. In addition, ChristoforosDiakoulakis, Thomas Tracey, Christoph Ribbat, Daniel Turnbull, andMatt Tresco turn in diverse readings of Wallace around such topics as,respectively, love and scotopia, representations of trauma in Oblivion,his relationship to New Journalism, ethics, and autism.For a collection purporting to establish a field of Wallace studies,and one that is admirably attempting to do so through a wide range ofnew approaches, however, Consider David Foster Wallace remainsunsatisfactory. Part of this is the sheer brevity of the essays (none islonger than fifteen pages), as well as the ratio of graduate work to theReviews: English and film 105work of more established critics (ten to six), but Consider ultimatelyhighlights how much more work still needs to be done on Wallace.Though probably an inescapable problem for any first collectionattempting to define a field – especially for a writer whose output wasso voluminous and diverse – there is a pervading sense that Consider isa rushed initial foray into what should prove to be an important newfield of literary studies. That said, Consider should be welcomed for thesimple fact that it makes quite clear a serious conversation aboutWallace is already under way and will continue productively into theforeseeable future.Further ReadingBoswell, Marshall, Understanding David Foster Wallace (Columbia SC: Uni-versity of South Carolina Press, 2003).Carlisle, Greg, Elegant Complexity: A Study of David Foster Wallace’s ‘InfiniteJest’ (Los Angeles: Sideshow Media Group Press, 2007).Freudenthal, Elizabeth, ‘Anti-Interiority: Compulsiveness, Objectification, andIdentity in Infinite Jest’, New Literary History, 41:1 (Winter 2010), 192–211.Giles, Paul, ‘Sentimental Posthumanism: David Foster Wallace’, TwentiethCentury Literature, 53:3 (Fall 2007), 327–44.Hayles, N. Katherine, ‘The Illusion of Autonomy and the Fact of Recursivity:Virtual Ecologies, Entertainment, and Infinite Jest’, New Literary History, 30:3Ecocriticism (Summer 1999), 675–97.LeClair, Tom, ‘The Prodigious Fiction of Richard Powers, William Vollmann,and David Foster Wallace’, Critique, 38:1 (Fall 1996), 12–37.Lipsky, David, Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Tripwith David Foster Wallace (New York: Broadway Books, 2010).Max, D. T., ‘The Unfinished’, New Yorker (9 March 2009). hhttp://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/03/09/090309fa_fact_maxi106 Critical Quarterly, vol. 53, no. 2

Consider David Foster Wallace: Critical Essays edited by David Hering

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Consider David Foster Wallace: Critical Essays edited by David Hering

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