Marshall Boswell - Understanding David Foster Wallace

DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

Matthew J. Bruccoli, Founding Editor

Linda Wagner-Martin, Series Editor

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UNDERSTANDING

Revised and Expanded Edition

Marshall Boswell

2020 University of South Carolina

Published by the University of South Carolina Press

Columbia, South Carolina 29208

www.uscpress.com

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data can be found at http://catalog.loc.gov/.

ISBN 978-1-64336-068-3 (hardback)

ISBN 978-1-64336-069-0 (paperback)

ISBN 978-1-64336-070-6 (ebook)

Quotations from Brief Interviews with Hideous Men by David Foster Wallace, copyright 1999. Reprinted by permission of Little, Brown and Company, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

Quotations from The Broom of the System by David Foster Wallace, copyright 1987 by David Foster Wallace. Used by permission of Viking Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. And by permission of the David Foster Wallace Literary Trust.

Quotations from Girl with Curious Hair by David Foster Wallace, Copyright 1989 by David Foster Wallace. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. And by permission of the David Foster Wallace Literary Trust.

Quotations from Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, copyright 1996. Reprinted by permission of Little, Brown and Company, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

Quotations from Oblivion by David Foster Wallace, copyright 2004. Reprinted by permission of Little, Brown and Company, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

Quotations from The Pale King by David Foster Wallace, copyright 2011. Reprinted by permission of Little, Brown and Company, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc. Published in the UK by Hamish Hamilton (2011) and Penguin Books (2012). Copyright David Foster Wallace Literary Trust, 2011.

Front cover photograph: Basso Cannarsa/Opale
Agence Opale / Alamy Stock Photo

The Broom of the System:
Wallace, Wittgenstein, and the Rules of the Game

Infinite Jest: Too Much Fun for Anyone
Mortal to Hope to Endure

Brief Interviews with Hideous Men:
Interrogations and Consolidations

The Understanding Contemporary American Literature series was founded by the estimable Matthew J. Bruccoli (19312008), who envisioned these volumes as guides or companions for students as well as good nonacademic readers, a legacy that will continue as new volumes are developed to fill in gaps among the nearly one hundred series volumes published to date and to embrace a host of new writers only now making their marks on our literature.

As Professor Bruccoli explained in his preface to the volumes he edited, because much influential contemporary literature makes special demands, the word understanding in the titles was chosen deliberately. Many willing readers lack an adequate understanding of how contemporary literature works; that is, of what the author is attempting to express and the means by which it is conveyed. Aimed at fostering this understanding of good literature and good writers, the criticism and analysis in the series provide instruction in how to read certain contemporary writersexplicating their material, language, structures, themes, and perspectivesand facilitate a more profitable experience of the works under discussion.

In the twenty-first century, Professor Bruccolis prescience gives us an avenue to publish expert critiques of significant contemporary American writing. The series continues to map the literary landscape and to provide both instruction and enjoyment. Future volumes will seek to introduce new voices alongside canonized favorites, to chronicle the changing literature of our times, and to remain, as Professor Bruccoli conceived, contemporary in the best sense of the word.

Linda Wagner-Martin, Series Editor

When the first edition of Understanding David Foster Wallace appeared in 2003, Wallace studies was in its infancy. The only other book-length monograph devoted to his work was Stephen J. Burns indispensable Readers Guide to Infinite Jest, while Wallaces corpus extended no further than Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (1999). In the years following 2003, Wallace published two more major works of fiction, the story collection Oblivion (2004) and the posthumous novel The Pale King (2011). And in the wake of his 2008 suicide, scholarly interest in Wallaces work has skyrocketed, to the extent that there is now both a scholarly imprint and a journal devoted solely to his writing. For this new edition, I have added a chapter a piece to the two works of fiction that were absent from this books original version. I have also substantially revised the earlier material so as to keep the page count roughly equivalent to that of the first edition. I have made no effort to account for the deluge of Wallace scholarship that has appeared since this books original publication. In keeping with the spirit of the Understanding Contemporary American Literature series, this new volume continues to serve as an accessible guide to Wallaces work for both students and nonacademic readers.

I am grateful for the editorial assistance I have received in preparation of this manuscript. I am particularly indebted to Richard Brown, director of the University of South Carolina Press, for reaching out to me and proposing this new edition. I am also grateful to the original publishers of the new material added to this volume. A slightly different version of chapter 6 first appeared in A Companion to David Foster Wallace Studies, which I coedited with Stephen Burn (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2013). Similarly chapter 7 first appeared in Studies in the Novel 44: 4 (Winter 2012). I also included this essay in my edited volume, David Foster Wallace and The Long Thing: New Essays on the Novels (New York: Bloomsbury, 2015).

Born on February 21, 1962, two years after the publication of John Barths The Sot-Weed Factor, David Foster Wallace came into the world at more or less the exact moment American postmodernism proper came into its own. His novel Infinite Jest (1996) is as far away chronologically from Barths groundbreaking work as Barths book was from James Joyces modernist touchstone, Ulysses (1922). As a result, although critics often label Wallace as a postmodern writer, he might best be regarded as a nervous member of some still unnamed (and perhaps unnamable) third wave of modernism. He confidently situated himself as the direct heir to a tradition of aesthetic development that began with the modernist overturning of nineteenth-century bourgeois realism and continued with the postwar critique of modernist aesthetics. Yet Wallace proceeded from the assumption that both modernism and postmodernism were essentially done. In charting a new direction for literary practice, his work did not seek to overturn postmodernism, no more than it called for a return to modernism. Rather Wallaces work moved resolutely forward while hoisting the baggage of modernism and postmodernism heavily, but respectfully, on its back.