Last Hands: Galleys, Corrections, and Thirty Years of a Moving Text

The text of Infinite Jest is a thirty-year event, not an object

The story usually stops at the handshake. Wallace and his editor spent two years arguing the manuscript into shape, the book went to the printer, and the book became a thing you can buy. But the words did not stop moving when the arguing did. Wallace kept revising in the proofs; he kept correcting the printed book after it shipped; and eight years after his death the publisher reset the whole novel and corrected it again. There is no single object called the text of Infinite Jest. There is a sequence of text-states, spread across thirty years and several sets of hands, and a reader holding any one printing is holding one frame of something that was still in motion when it left the last pair. This essay follows the words after the manuscript stopped being a manuscript.

The book went to press still shrinking

The cutting did not end with the famous editorial negotiation; it ran right into the proofs. The clearest single witness is a letter Wallace wrote Don DeLillo in May 1995, with the book already at the copyeditor: "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-ff). David Hering, who read the surviving draft containers at the Harry Ransom Center, puts the total removed "in the region of 150 pages" and reports that Wallace's own later, larger figures are "not borne out by the extant archive material" — while allowing that there may be "more deleted material held outside the archive" (hering-ff). How that two-year edit ran, who asked for what, and why the folklore of a giant publisher's cut has the story backwards is the subject of the editing of Infinite Jest; what matters here is only the direction of travel it leaves us pointed in. The book was still being shortened as it went onto the press, which means the last authorial revisions happened not on a manuscript but on a typeset object — and that object survives.

The galley proofs: a penultimate draft

Late in 1995, Little, Brown sent reviewers bound advance galleys — 1,079 pages long, already set at the pagination the hardcover would keep. Somebody has since compared those galleys line by line against the February 1996 first printing, and the comparison shows that Wallace kept working the whole time. "Wallace had clearly worked on the book between the advance galleys and the hardcover release"; the changes, scores of them, were "made for what seemed to be purely aesthetic reasons," enough that it is fair to read the galleys as "a kind of penultimate draft" (dfwwords-2016). None of this is structural — no scene moves, no chapter appears or vanishes. It is word- and comma-grain revision, done after the type was set, on a book most authors would have considered finished. It is the last documented layer of Wallace's own hand on the text.

Some of the changes are pure fine-tuning of the joke. Petropolis Kahn's nickname is The Wholly Mammoth in the galleys and "The Petropulator was Petropolis Kahn" in print (scene 172, p. 907) — a whole pun swapped out at the last stage for a better one. The runaway-bricklayer letter, whose comedy depends on barrel-and-counterweight arithmetic, has the bricklayer declaring in the galleys that I weigh 320 kg — about seven hundred pounds, which breaks the physics; the hardcover fixes it to "I weigh 75 kg" (scene 043, p. 139), and the joke works again.

Others tune the world's proper names and vocabulary right up to the deadline. Avril's full name is Avril Mondragon Incandenza in the galleys and "Avril Mondragon Tavis Incandenza, Ed.D., Ph.D." in the hardcover (scene 170, p. 898): the middle name "Tavis" — the textual thread readers pull on when they wonder about her kinship to the headmaster — was inserted at the very last stage, not long-standing copy. Even the book's central euphemism was still unsettled. In one Marathe and Steeply exchange the galleys' About the samizdat of now becomes "About the Entertainment of now" (scene 123, p. 646); a few pages later, the galleys' bare the director's other son gains the word back the other way, printing "samizdat's director's other son" (scene 127, p. 658). The two edits run in opposite directions — the terminology was being balanced by ear, not standardized.

A few changes move the meaning. In the Lung, the galleys have Hal descend and "exhale palely"; the hardcover adds the clause that has him "and get secretly high" (scene 013, p. 52) — the explicit statement of Hal's private highs went in at the last stage, one more instance of Wallace tuning, to the word, how much of Hal's drug life the text admits. And the most instructive change of all runs against every intuition about how errors happen. In the passage where Avril reports Dolores Rusk's diagnosis to Mario, the galleys print "afraid" as A.F.R.aid — "persons who are deeply A.F.R.aid" — twice, a typo with, as the collator says, "obvious allusive frisson," the book's terrorist cell surfacing inside the word for fear (dfwwords-2016). It looks exactly like the kind of buried Wallace joke a reader would frame. It was in the galleys, and it was corrected out for the hardcover (scene 154, p. 765, reads plain "afraid"). The meaningful-looking oddity was the accident; the production process removed it. Keep that direction in mind.

The other half of the galley changes is quieter and all in one direction: cutting. Between galley and print, small over-specifications get trimmed — an intensifier here, an adverb there — and a handful of whole sentences disappear. Kate Gompert's overdose inventory loses its smoked some pot and; a clause tying the timing of a man's departure to Joelle's disfigurement — left her after her mother had accidentally thrown acid at her, — is dropped, quietly leaving that much more of her face an open question. One of the largest cuts in the whole layer is a sentence from one of Marlon Bain's letters that had said, flatly, "I know that his youngest son Hal found the body, and that there were traumas surrounding that discovery which Orin believes have not even been acknowledged, much less resolved." It stood in the galleys and never reached print (dfwwords-2016). Whether the book is better or worse for having withheld that is an argument for other essays; the fact for this one is that the withholding was a late decision, made on the proofs, not a gap that was simply never filled. By this stage the world's names had otherwise settled — the galleys already read "Year of the Whopper," the subsidized year that in the earliest drafts had been the Year of the Twinkie, so the renaming churn was behind him. What was left to do, he did in the margins of a typeset book.

The corrections notebook: the author edits his own first edition

He was not done even then. The Ransom Center holds a bound copy of Infinite Jest labelled, in Wallace's hand, "Corrections of Typos/Errors for Paperback Printing of Infinite Jest," addressed "from David Foster Wallace to Nona Krug and Michael Pietsch" and self-dated to June 1996 — roughly four months after the book was published (culturemap-hrc). The corrected text scholars are told to cite, the 1997 paperback, comes out of this list: it is not a house cleanup but the author's own, made by going back through his printed first edition and marking it up.

The best-photographed page is page 30, in the professional-conversationalist scene, and it is not a typo at all — it is Wallace enforcing his own arithmetic. The first printing had the ten-year-old Hal misdescribed as twelve; on his own copy Wallace changes it to ten in two places, and clips a note explaining why — that at thirteen in one subsidized year Hal would come out nineteen in another, contradicting the year-list later in the book. So the reading text now has Hal protest "I'm ten for Pete's sake" and call himself the "ten-year-old tennis and lexical prodigy" (scene 005, p. 30), and a page earlier promise "I'll be eleven in June" (scene 005, p. 27) — all of it the author repairing, months after publication, a numeric seam a reader would almost never notice. It is a small thing that means a large one: the man who fought for every difficulty in this book also went back and quietly fixed its bookkeeping, by hand, once it was already on shelves. The version scholars call authoritative is authoritative precisely because it is the one he kept correcting.

Thirty years of printings: the anniversary edition

Then his hand comes off the book for good — Wallace died in 2008 — and the text keeps changing anyway. For the twentieth anniversary in 2016, Little, Brown reset the novel and made roughly fifty more corrections, and because there is no author left to make them, these are purely editorial states of the published book. Most are janitorial: misspellings swept up, a doubled word removed, a missing close-quote restored. A reader can fingerprint which printing they own by them. If your copy reads "Italianate stuff Scorcese had" (scene 083, p. 393), you have a pre-anniversary text; the 2016 reset spells it "Scorsese." A few of the fixes are almost comic in their fallibility — an endnote's "kibbitzing Hal and Schacht" was "corrected" in 2016 to "kibitizng," which is simply a different misspelling, so the fix introduced a typo the earlier printings never had (dfwwords-anniv). The reset even reached the book's silent furniture: a small partial circle in the lower corner of page 981, present in the hardcover and lost from intermediate printings, "makes its first appearance since the hardcover, but is cut off way too much" (dfwwords-anniv) — a four-state history for a single graphic mark that most readers have never once looked at.

But a book this full of deliberate wrongness raises a real worry about a correction pass, and the anniversary edition raises it sharply: when the publisher "fixed" the novel, did it also fix things Wallace broke on purpose? The evidence is honestly mixed and there is no authorial paper to settle it. The clearest flag is a misspelling the reset touched once and left standing elsewhere: it corrected "Antitoi Entertainent" to "Entertainment" at one spot while the same odd spelling recurs, untouched, in other scenes — the sort of inconsistency that suggests the editors were guessing at intent, not following a list. The collator, no enemy of the pass, credits it — "a good 92% of their emendations help Infinite Jest put its best foot forward for first-time readers" — and in the same breath admits, "I did wonder if they fixed some intentional errors," while a reader in the comments puts the danger plainly: "yes, there are many intentional errors as well, some of which must never be changed" (dfwwords-anniv). The worry is real, but it should be graded, not dramatized. There is no documentation that any specific 2016 change overwrote a designed error; the charge is inference from the book's known love of buried mistakes. And the galley proofs cut the other way: the A.F.R.aid case shows the production process is just as capable of removing an accidental-looking-meaningful oddity as of flattening a deliberate one. A surviving strangeness in your copy is not automatically design, and a corrected one is not automatically vandalism. The honest position is that a twentieth-anniversary reader is holding a text that is cleaner, slightly, and less certainly the author's, slightly, than the one their parents bought.

What you are holding

So the plain question — what is the text of Infinite Jest? — turns out not to have a plain answer. It has a chronology. There is the galley state, still being revised. There is the February 1996 first printing, the last text Wallace had not yet corrected. There is the 1997 paperback, the first text he had, carrying his own June 1996 fixes. There are the printings in between, drifting. And there is the 2016 reset, cleaner and authorless, from which he is absent in a way he was absent from nothing before. A reader who wants to know which of these they are holding can check it at the seams — an age, a director's name, a circle in a corner — and the detailed map of who changed what, and when, is kept for anyone who wants it. What a careful reader should carry away is simpler than the map: the book you own is one state of a thing that kept moving, edited by its author until he could not, and by his publisher after he was gone. The last hands on Infinite Jest were not Wallace's, and they will probably not be the publisher's either.

Sources

• hering-ff — firsthand read of the surviving Ransom Center draft containers: the ~150-page archival cut floor, the judgment that Wallace's larger self-reports are unsupported, and the May 1995 DeLillo letter placing the cutting at the copyedit stage. Used only for the one-paragraph hinge into the editing history.
• dfwwords-galleys-vs-first-printing — the only published line-by-line collation of the late-1995 advance galleys against the February 1996 hardcover: the "penultimate draft" characterization, and the ~205 word- and punctuation-grain variants curated here (A.F.R.aid, the Petropulator rename, the Tavis insertion, the "get secretly high" addition, the samizdat/Entertainment swaps, the bricklayer weight, and the subtractive drops — Gompert's pot, the Joelle acid clause, the Bain "Hal found the body" sentence).
• culturemap-hrc — the Ransom Center's bound copy of Wallace's own June 1996 corrections list to Nona Krug and Michael Pietsch, from which the 1997 paperback derives; the page 30 age fix as image-witnessed.
• dfwwords-20th-anniversary-corrections — the collation of earlier printings against the 2016 twentieth-anniversary reset: the ~50 editorial emendations, the fingerprint readings (Scorsese, the kibitizng self-inflicted typo, the restored page 981 circle), and the intentional-error worry (the untouched "Antitoi Entertainent," the 92% praise, the "fixed some intentional errors" doubt).