The Ethics of the Wallace Archive

essay

The day the boxes opened

On 14 September 2010 the Harry Ransom Center in Austin opened its David Foster Wallace papers to the public, and the argument over them started the same day. The collection was enormous and, in one part, unbearably intimate: manuscripts and juvenilia and teaching files, and, alongside them, more than a hundred of the books Wallace had owned and written in. The blogger Blake Butler marked the opening on HTMLGIANT with a three-sentence post — the archive was live, it held "more than 100 books he owned, often annotated," and it embedded an image of the handwritten first page of the novel — and then, in the comment thread beneath it, the ethics of the whole enterprise came out into the open for the first time in this record (htmlgiant-butler-dfw-archives).

Butler's own unease was the seed of it. "I still feel slightly conflicted over the whole nature of archives," he wrote, and in the thread he said why: "i'm not sure that marginalia should always be exhibited," and least of all with a suicide — "especially with someone who killed themselves," as he put it — someone who never got to lay a plan over what would become of his things. He did not exempt himself from the charge: "i am also a voyeur." A commenter beneath him put the objection in its most elegiac form, mourning a vanished decorum of privacy: "what happened to attics and buried boxes and defiant wives and burning drafts and" the old injunction "don't show this to anyone? is this what it's like to die in the digital age?" The line that got quoted afterward was the last of it: "do we eat death like chips?"

The counter-argument was in the same thread, and it had teeth. There was, one commenter argued, a real difference between "opening an archive and publishing posthumous material", and serious readers "generally understand the nature of working materials" — a manuscript is a workshop, not a diary, and no one mistakes one for the other. If the release had truly violated Wallace's wishes, the same reader reasoned, the people who had run his professional life would have said so. The privacy claim and the scholarship claim were both already fully formed, on opening day, before anyone had read a word of the margins — which is exactly what makes the fight that followed worth telling straight.

Bustillos in the reading room

Seven months later someone read the margins. In April 2011 the journalist Maria Bustillos published the first close account of Wallace's annotated personal library in the Awl, after three days in the reading room with what she described as "three hundred-odd books from his personal library, most of them annotated, some heavily as if he were scribbling a dialogue with the author page by page" (theawl-bustillos-self-help-library). The surprise of the collection was its shelf of popular self-help — Bradshaw, Alice Miller, Ernest Kurtz, M. Scott Peck, "stuff of the best-sellingest, Oprah-level cheesiness", read as carefully and repeatedly as the Wittgenstein beside it. It was the least glamorous part of the archive and, as it turned out, the most exposed.

She argued from the marginalia that the wish to be ordinary — "getting rid of the whole idea of special gifts, of the exceptional, and of genius, is the most powerful current running through all of Wallace's work" — organized the whole career, the novel included. She read the addiction and recovery material of the book as "based not on research but on experience", grounded in Wallace's own time in a Boston halfway house rather than in reportage, an argument the archive lets her make from the inside and that addiction and recovery takes up on its own terms. She read Hal as a self-portrait — "Hal is so obviously a projection of Wallace", the gifted prodigy alienated to death by his own gifts — and she read the marginalia in Wallace's heavily marked copy of Alice Miller's The Drama of the Gifted Child, where by her account he "blames his mother for quite a lot of his suffering", onto the novel's Avril, the mother "whose love is suffocating, all-encompassing, intrusive, terrible." She was careful about it — she rejected Miller's mother-blaming thesis as lopsided and read Wallace's absorption of it as a symptom of a bad period, not a verdict — but the reading did what Butler had feared: it turned a living woman's son's private annotations into public evidence.

And Bustillos knew it. The essay's most honest sentence is the one where she turns the charge on herself: "this literary sleuthing is also just prying." The readerly claim and the privacy qualm were not opposing camps here; they were running in a single writer at the same time. That is the shape of the whole controversy in miniature — the most illuminating reading of the archive and the clearest sense that it should not have been possible, held together in one piece of prose.

The books come off the shelf

Four months after that, the shelf changed. In August 2011 Bustillos reported a follow-up she had not seen coming: every book she had discussed was gone. The library that "used to contain 320-odd books, now contains 299", the missing volumes withdrawn at the estate's request (theawl-bustillos-self-help-removed). She was blindsided. "It never occurred to me that Wallace's estate would be in a position to rescind part of the sale of his documents to the Ransom Center", she wrote; she had built her essay on the assumption that "these books would remain available to anyone who was interested in seeing them", and she was "entirely freaked out -- to learn that that will no longer be the case."

The removal was real and, by the standards of the field, unusual. The Austin American-Statesman reported that "the Ransom Center at the University of Texas has removed 11 books from the previously public materials in the archive" — "several self-help books in which Wallace made margin notes about living family members" — at the family's request (statesman-gross-ransom-center-restricts). The Center did not pretend the sequence was ideal. "In an ideal world, all of this material should have been vetted first," its associate director conceded; material that could harm the living is sometimes withheld, but, the paper noted, "such arrangements are usually worked out in advance of an acquisition -- not after the materials have already been made public." An outside curator at Yale's Beinecke put the norm plainly: "Restrictions do arise, but it's something that we rarely do, and we do it reluctantly". Pulling already-public material back off the shelf is close to the one thing archives are built not to do.

The Center made no apology for the substance of the decision, only for its timing. "The material was removed at the request of the mother and the widow. There's a certain vulnerability in this whole process," its director said; the restricted items, a spokeswoman added, "contain annotations with sensitive, private information about members of the family, and the materials will remain restricted during the lifetimes of the specific individuals affected". Even the scale of the withdrawal came out contested and was never squared: the newspaper counted eleven books, while the arithmetic in Bustillos's own notice — from 320-odd down to 299 — pointed closer to twenty-one. The two figures stand unreconciled, as everything about this archive's numbers seems to.

Goldberg, and the illusion of closeness

The people who actually sat in the reading room kept arriving at the same warning. In June 2011, between Bustillos's essay and the removal, Justine Tal Goldberg published a Texas Observer meditation on a curated tour of the same collection, opening on confessed bafflement — "I've never understood David Foster Wallace" — and closing on the archive's portrait of an exacting, self-doubting craftsman (texasobserver-goldberg-archived-soul). The library, she found, held "302 books from Wallace's personal library", a man who read a supermarket mystery beside Kant; as a Ransom librarian said of him, "He didn't just read these books. He digested them". The temptation of all that intimacy was exactly the danger. The curator warned her off it: "It's dangerous to believe that you know the person by knowing the materials," and with Wallace "there's even more danger of that." Goldberg's own conclusion was that the papers showed many selves, "much more than 42 document boxes and 302 volumes can hold".

The scholar Graham Foster, writing from inside a Wallace doctorate, had reached the demystifying version of the same point a few months earlier. The archive, he insisted, was "not a shimmering wormhole into Wallace's personal psyche or a curtain-twitching view into his private life"; the manuscripts themselves were "primarily work-related, with little annotation other than that to do with the nuts and bolts of writing" (newstatesman-foster-in-the-archive). And that is the quiet structural fact under the whole controversy. The papers were clean; the workshop really was a workshop. The radioactive material was not the drafts at all but the personal library — the "306 annotated books from Wallace's personal library", in Foster's count, or 302 in Goldberg's, or 320-odd in Bustillos's, the number never once agreeing with itself — where a private reader, not a working writer, had left his marks. The exposure lived in the one part of the collection that was never a workshop.

Nadell's account

The estate finally explained itself, and its case is the third that has to be heard whole. In September 2011 Wallace's literary agent, Bonnie Nadell, published a statement through the Wallace hub Howling Fantods laying out why the books had been pulled (hf-nadell-changes-to-wallace-archive). It is an account of grief and haste, not censorship. "In those first months after David died, the Ransom Center had approached us about buying the archives", she wrote, and "in the craziness of grief and the mess of packing up the books into boxes to send to the archives, we made some mistakes." Some of the mistakes were provenance errors that scholarship should want fixed for its own sake: books Wallace had bought secondhand or been given already marked, so that "scholars in the archives might think they were reading David's thoughts/critiques on Mill on the Floss and they were actually some stranger's", and books in which he had jotted other people's data — "There were others that had people's cell phone numbers and home addresses that David had written in books". Those were covered or removed on grounds no reader would dispute.

The self-help books were the harder call, and Nadell owned it directly: "And yes we did decide to restrict some of the self help books that were pored over and written about on the Awl", because "these were really personal comments about family members (written years ago) and are private." A reader's annotated library, she argued, was a genuinely new kind of object, one nobody had thought through in the packing: "we did not realize how much personal and private information was in them." Her principle was flat and unhedged, and it is the estate's claim at its strongest: "It's a matter of privacy, to me. These are not public figures, their lives are not meant to be discussed on the internet." The people exposed in the margins were a living mother and widow who had signed up for none of it — the same protective instinct that, at the composition end, had already made Wallace change names and details in the recovery scenes at his editor's warning, a privacy revision traced in the editing of Infinite Jest.

What the restriction left

There is no referee for this fight, and the honest thing is not to appoint one. Butler's objection was reasonable: exhibiting a suicide's private margins, so soon, with no wishes on file, is a real trespass. Bustillos's claim was reasonable: the marginalia were the truest available account of how one of the era's central writers understood his own mind, and reading them was scholarship, not just prying — though she was clear-eyed that it was also that. And the estate's claim was reasonable: the notes exposed named, living people who were not public figures, and protecting them was a duty the sale had never meant to waive. Each position gave up something real to hold its ground. The archive was the place where three good claims could not all be honored at once.

What the fight settled was not the ethics but the epistemics. The restriction left behind a permanent condition on what can now be known from the margins, and it is a condition every later reader of that library works under. The self-help books that grounded the strongest biographical readings of the novel are off the shelf and will stay off it for as long as the family it names is alive; the transcriptions that survive cannot be checked against the pages that produced them. And the estate's own account supplies the caution that outlasts the removal: some of the hands in those margins were never Wallace's at all, and some pages were redacted before anyone else could see them. So any claim built on a marginal note in Wallace's personal library now rests on a chain the withdrawal broke — an identification that cannot be re-verified, built on a provenance the custodian has warned is unreliable. Marginalia-derived attribution is now permanently hedged — a reading that has to carry its own asterisk.

Sources

htmlgiant-butler-dfw-archives — the opening-day post and its comment thread (14 September 2010): Butler's "conflicted" qualm and voyeur admission, the "attics and buried boxes" elegy and the "eat death like chips?" flourish, and the working-materials counter-argument.
theawl-bustillos-self-help-library — Maria Bustillos's April 2011 close reading of the self-help library: the escape-from-genius thesis, the autobiographical and Hal-as-surrogate readings, the Miller-marginalia reading of Avril, and the "this literary sleuthing is also just prying" self-indictment.
theawl-bustillos-self-help-removed — Bustillos's August 2011 notice of the withdrawal: the 320-odd-to-299 drop, her surprise that the estate could rescind part of the sale, and her dismay.
statesman-gross-ransom-center-restricts — Joe Gross's September 2011 Austin American-Statesman report: the eleven books removed, the mother-and-widow request, the vetting-should-come-first concession, and the Beinecke curator on how rarely archives restrict.
texasobserver-goldberg-archived-soul — Justine Tal Goldberg's June 2011 Texas Observer essay: the exacting-craftsman portrait, the 302-book library, and the curator's warning against the illusion of knowing a writer through his papers.
hf-nadell-changes-to-wallace-archive — Bonnie Nadell's September 2011 statement: the grief-and-haste account, the non-Wallace-marginalia and third-party-data provenance problems, the self-help restriction, and the privacy principle.
newstatesman-foster-in-the-archive — Graham Foster's February 2011 New Statesman piece: the demystified, work-only manuscripts and the 306-book personal library, establishing that the exposed material lived in the library, not the drafts.
how-ij-was-read, the-editing-of-ij, addiction-and-recovery — the reception history, the composition record the same archive yielded (including the Karr-prompted privacy revision), and the recovery-house autobiographical reading Bustillos grounds in the marginalia.