DeLillo and Infinite Jest

The one influence he confessed

Every discussion of Infinite Jest's literary parentage eventually reaches for the same short list of fathers — Pynchon, Gaddis, DeLillo, the metafictionists Wallace both loved and tried to outrun. Most of that lineage is inferred: readers and scholars set two books beside each other and argue from resemblance. The DeLillo case is different, and it is different in the one way that matters. It is the influence Wallace put in writing, in his own hand, while the novel was being made.

The document is a letter Wallace sent Don DeLillo on 11 June 1992, deep in the composition of Infinite Jest, and it is as close to a signed confession as the influence question ever gets. A long thing he was in the middle of, Wallace wrote, had a section that "owes a rather uncomfortable debt to certain exchanges between Gary Harkness and Major Staley" — the two characters whose paper war game runs through Don DeLillo's second novel, End Zone (1972) (foster-deep-insiders-elegiac-tribute-orbit). A month later, in a follow-up of 15 July 1992, he pinned the borrowed passage down to the page: the relevant exchange, he told DeLillo, "is in Chapter 29, which in my old Pocket paperback is pp. 180-185." In the same letter he named his own worry about it — the allusion might be "potentially piratical" — and framed the whole gesture of writing to the older novelist at all as "the Sicilian-type Respect of the prenominate gesture." A man does not itemize the page numbers of his own theft unless the debt is weighing on him.

Two things keep this from being one enthusiast's flourish. The first is that the letters are attested twice, independently. Graham Foster quotes both of them in a peer-reviewed 2016 article, working from the originals in the DeLillo Papers at the Harry Ransom Center (foster-deep-insiders-elegiac-tribute-orbit); and an archivist who had read the same folder eight years earlier, with no knowledge of Foster, transcribed the same "rather uncomfortable debt" wording from the same letter (ambiguities-delillo-dfw-mortal-drama). Two readers, years apart, copied out the same words. The second is that the debt shows up in the manuscript apparatus itself. When Wallace sent his publisher the first draft, its coversheet — headed, in his usual key, "PRIVATE DOCUMENT: INTENDED ONLY FOR RETINAS OF PEOPLE TO WHOM IT'S EXPLICITLY SENT" — carried a bibliography for the Eschaton scene naming six sources, and End Zone was on the list, alongside a calculus textbook and several treatises on game theory (foster-deep-insiders-elegiac-tribute-orbit). Wallace was, quite literally, working with the DeLillo open on the desk.

End Zone to Eschaton, on the page

The section Wallace was apologizing for is Eschaton: the global-thermonuclear-war game the Enfield juniors play with four hundred dead tennis balls across four contiguous courts. Set it against the End Zone war game and the debt is not hard to see. Both scenes run on the same fuel — cascading strings of coined military-bloc acronyms escalating a tabletop crisis toward catastrophe. On the Enfield courts the day's players are sorted into a "theoretical Anschluss" whose teams roll out in exactly that idiom: "another three SOVWAR, one or two REDCHI" (scene 073, p. 323), the whole apparatus building toward "an all-out apocalyptic series of punishing Strikes Against Civilian Populations" (scene 073, p. 324) until, in the passage Foster sets directly beside End Zone's own pre-game situation report, "the remorseless logic of game theory compels SOVWAR to go SACPOP while it still has the chance" (scene 073, p. 325). Wallace himself described the borrowed End Zone material, per the fullest fan catalogue of the parallels, as "a sequence in End Zone where a teacher and student play a sort of war game on paper" (dfwwords-enfield-end-zone).

The Eschaton debt is the largest, but not the only one. The whole Enfield Tennis Academy half of the novel carries End Zone's fingerprints, and the resemblances have been catalogued in detail: DeLillo's sportscaster-in-training Raymond Toon, who narrates games into his own fist, becomes Jim Troeltsch, who narrates cartridge matches into his; the taciturn football prodigy Taft Robinson becomes the taciturn tennis prodigy John "No Relation" Wayne; Hal's compulsive philosophizing, Foster notes, recalls End Zone's narrator Harkness; and behind both squads stand mock-Germanic coaches, tower-surveillance of practice, and the same running suspicion of the refectory milk (dfwwords-enfield-end-zone, foster-deep-insiders-elegiac-tribute-orbit). This is the part of the influence claim that pays out on the page rather than in the biography. It is specific, it is locatable, and — uniquely among the novel's supposed literary fathers — Wallace told us where to look.

The correspondence, and the worry

The letters are not only evidence of a debt; they are the record of an anxiety about it. A man who calls his own allusion "potentially piratical" is already worrying he has taken too much. And the one honest reader who has left a note of doubt worried about it from the other side. The 2008 archivist, having read End Zone and then the correspondence, wondered whether Wallace was "being a bit coy with DeLillo" — whether the "rather uncomfortable debt" was really as unconscious as its framing suggested, or whether Wallace had been fully aware of the war-game scene and dressed the borrowing up as accident to win a hero's approval — before deciding he "can't imagine DFW not being up front about something like this" (ambiguities-delillo-dfw-mortal-drama). It is a useful hesitation to keep in view: the confession is real, but a confession offered to the man you are borrowing from is never entirely disinterested.

What began as that borrowing turned into a correspondence that ran the length of the composition and beyond. Wallace, by the archivist's account, "wrote DeLillo out of the blue with a kind of fan letter in 1992" and kept writing for years; the older man became, as the same reader put it, "a considerate, thoughtful, and generous mentor-figure" (ambiguities-delillo-dfw-mortal-drama). The grind of finishing the book reached DeLillo directly. In a letter of May 1995, Wallace reported the cutting: "I, largely unaided, cut 310 pages from the fucker over the winter (it is, still, pretty long), and now even as it's at the copyeditor they say they'd like another 100 or so cut" (hering-dfw-fiction-and-form) — the manuscript's own arithmetic is another essay's business, but the fact that he was reporting it to DeLillo tells you who he had made his witness.

The fullest of these letters is the one he sent that October, after the book was done and in page proofs, and it is the most unguarded account we have of what the novel cost him. He had not sent DeLillo the book for a blurb, he insisted, but because "I stand a decent chance of learning something." The letter is built around a sentence of DeLillo's own, which Wallace quotes back to him — "The novel is a fucking killer. I try to show it every respect." — and it turns, in its center, into a confession: writing was no longer fun. "I have a lot of dread and terror and inadequacy-shit, now," he wrote, "when I'm trying to write." He wanted a way through it, not around it: "there must be some way to turn terror into Respect and dread into a kind of stolidly productive humility," to end what he named "the war of LOOK AT ME v. RESPECT A FUCKING KILLER" (hrc-letters-1995-rcm-scans; the "LOOK AT ME" phrase is attested a second time from the physical letter by ambiguities-delillo-dfw-mortal-drama). The posture throughout is apprentice to master — the man who had confessed a debt in 1992 still, three years and a thousand pages later, writing to the same figure to ask how the work was supposed to feel.

The wider shelf, and what DeLillo said after

Beyond End Zone, the case broadens into an oeuvre-wide apprenticeship, though the further it reaches the softer the evidence gets. Wallace's admiration is on record — he called DeLillo the "best fiction writer alive" — and the fullest fan-argument for the wider debt holds that Infinite Jest "just as easily could have been called Americana," after DeLillo's 1971 debut (dfwwords-delillo-americana). Some of those parallels are suggestive and no more — "Each book has a mother character who is a grammarian shrouded in familial mystery with incestuous overtones" is the kind of resemblance that proves less the closer you look. But one is concrete: Americana counts the holes in a telephone mouthpiece against the holes in its earpiece, and "There is the same reference to the holes in telephone receivers" in Infinite Jest, where it becomes the videophony aside about a handset's six earpiece pinholes and its thirty-six on the mouthpiece (dfwwords-delillo-americana; the videophony passage, scene 047). The archive even records a small, wordless gesture in the other direction: on Wallace's Fall 1994 syllabus for a literature course at Illinois State, a Don DeLillo story assigned for early November is struck through and hand-replaced, in green ink, with George Saunders' "Isabelle" (hrc-marginalia-galleries-survey). The syllabus gives no reason and the swap argues nothing about influence in either direction; it is texture, a note of where Wallace's teaching attention was turning in the exact months he was finishing his own DeLillo-haunted book. It has a small afterlife: George Saunders, the writer Wallace penciled in, would in time write one of the memorial tributes, remembering him as "one of the sweetest, most generous people I've ever known" (memorial-guardian-saunders-dfw-2010) — a note about the man rather than the influence, but a reminder that the shelf of living writers around Infinite Jest was also, for Wallace, a room of the people he read and taught and answered.

And there is the matter of what DeLillo said after. In a 2011 BBC radio documentary, DeLillo recalled a letter Wallace had sent him shortly after finishing Infinite Jest, in which — as DeLillo remembered it — Wallace called the novel his most serious and best work, while confessing that the ordinary pleasure of writing had been replaced by dread and terror (bbc-endnotes-dfw-2011, paraphrased from audio). The recollection is worth handling with care, because the letters let us check it. The dread-and-terror half is exact: those are Wallace's own typed words from the October 1995 letter, and the replaced pleasure of writing is there too. But the superlative is DeLillo's compression, not Wallace's phrase. What the letter actually claims is more measured — "I think IJ is less self-indulgent and show-offy than anything I'd done before it" (hrc-letters-1995-rcm-scans) — a comparative, not a coronation. DeLillo, remembering fifteen years on, rounded a careful self-assessment up into a verdict. The distinction is small and it is the whole discipline of the thing: the confession is real to the letter; the crown is the memory's.

Documented is not derived

So what does all of this add up to? It adds up to the best-documented literary apprenticeship in the whole reception of the novel — and to a caution about what documentation can and cannot prove. Influence confessed, located, and corroborated is not the same thing as derivation. The letters establish, beyond the usual reach of influence-talk, that Wallace read DeLillo closely, borrowed a scene from him consciously, worried about the theft, and treated him as a master for years. They do not establish that Infinite Jest is a DeLillo novel. What they establish is an anxiety — and it is worth noticing that anxiety of influence is not just the reader's diagnosis here but the book's own subject. Foster reads the novel as a deliberate dramatization of Harold Bloom's theory of poetic inheritance, down to a lecture, inside one of James Incandenza's films, that recites Bloom's revisionary ratios aloud; and he grounds the reading in Wallace's own stated allegiance to it — "I believe in Harold Bloom's theory of misprision," which makes his allusions, in Bloom's sense, "necessarily misreadings," creative distortions of the precursor rather than passive copies (foster-deep-insiders-elegiac-tribute-orbit).

Which is the right note to end on, because the misreading is where the debt turns into an achievement. End Zone's war game yields its narrator a stately, private contemplation; Eschaton yields a riot, the rules collapsing into a real brawl and the game's referee going head-first through the screen that holds them. The inheritance is exact and the outcome is opposite. One scholar puts the larger relation plainly: "Infinite Jest becomes a response to the work of Don DeLillo and other early postmodernists" (chambers-crowd-and-individual-delillo) — a response, that is, and not a reproduction; a book that takes DeLillo's diagnosis of a culture drowning in mediated spectacle and tries to supply the redemptive answer DeLillo's own fiction withholds. The father is real, and named, and thanked in the son's own hand. The son wrote a different book.

That is what sets this ancestor apart from the novel's louder literary father, Dostoevsky, whose presence in Infinite Jest is a documented obsession — Wallace saturated in the Russian as he wrote — without a single page that names him (the Karamazov frame). DeLillo is the quieter case and, in one respect, the stronger: the only literary debt in the whole novel that Wallace confessed, dated, and pinned to a page range — in a letter, to the man himself.

Sources

This essay draws on primary correspondence, its scholarly and eyewitness carriers, and the novel's own Eschaton text; the influence question it settles is the DeLillo one, which the archive keeps at the center of the novel's literary-inheritance record.

• foster-deep-insiders-elegiac-tribute-orbit — Graham Foster's peer-reviewed 2016 article, the fullest scholarly account of the DeLillo debt: it quotes both 1992 letters from the Ransom Center originals (the "rather uncomfortable debt," the End Zone Chapter 29 / pp. 180-185 pin, "potentially piratical," the coversheet bibliography), itemizes the End Zone to Enfield allusions (Toon, Robinson, Harkness), and reads the whole novel as a dramatization of Bloom's Anxiety of Influence.
• ambiguities-delillo-dfw-mortal-drama — an archivist's 2008 firsthand report from the DeLillo Papers, independent of and eight years before Foster: a second witness to the 1992 debt-letter's wording, the "coy vs. up-front" hesitation, the fan-letter-to-mentor arc, and an independent text-attestation of the October 1995 letter's "LOOK AT ME v. RESPECT A FUCKING KILLER."
• hrc-letters-1995-rcm-scans — the October 10, 1995 Wallace-to-DeLillo letter (image-derived transcription of the Ransom Center scans, quote-gate skipped at source): sent for learning not a blurb, the dread-and-terror confession, the wished conversion of terror into Respect, and the measured "less self-indulgent and show-offy" self-assessment the 2011 recollection compresses.
• hering-dfw-fiction-and-form — David Hering's genetic-criticism monograph, source of the May 1995 DeLillo letter on the cutting ("I, largely unaided, cut 310 pages...").
• dfwwords-enfield-end-zone and dfwwords-delillo-americana — the fullest fan catalogues of the End Zone / Enfield and Americana / Infinite Jest parallels; gatherings rather than first claims, and the carriers of the "war game on paper," "best fiction writer alive," and telephone-holes data.
• chambers-crowd-and-individual-delillo — the comparative thesis reading Infinite Jest against DeLillo's Mao II: the novel as a response to DeLillo, supplying the redemptive answer his diagnosis withholds.
• hrc-marginalia-galleries-survey — the archival survey carrying the Fall 1994 ISU syllabus (image-derived): the DeLillo-story-to-Saunders teaching swap, recorded as texture with no influence-direction claim.
• bbc-endnotes-dfw-2011 — DeLillo's 2011 broadcast recollection of the dread-and-terror letter (paraphrased from audio; the best-and-most-serious-work superlative is DeLillo's own compression, not the letter's words).
• memorial-guardian-saunders-dfw-2010 — George Saunders' 2010 memorial tribute; a reception grace-note tied to the syllabus swap (the writer Wallace wrote in later eulogized him), carried as reception, not as an influence claim.

The Eschaton war game is quoted from the novel by scene and page (scene 073); the Enfield / End Zone parallels and the Americana touchpoints are carried by the fan catalogues above and grounded in the raw scenes.