IJ study archive

BBC Radio 3, 'Endnotes': David Foster Wallace (2011) — pre-Pale King documentary with 1995 DFW tape, Amy Wallace, Mark Costello, Bonnie Nadell, Don DeLillo, Rick Moody, Curtis White, Charles Harris, and Michael Pietsch

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TL;DR

A rich pre-Pale-King BBC radio documentary, built around a 1995 BBC interview with the then-largely-unknown Wallace and new interviews with his sister, his college roommate, his agent, his editor, DeLillo, Moody, and his Illinois State colleagues. Its organizing thesis — Wallace's great theme as a culture's self-devouring solipsism and its ache for community, with irony the enemy and AA storytelling the countermodel — is argued through on-air readings of the novel's loneliness and recovery passages. Two segments carry real interpretive weight beyond eulogy: the Normal, Illinois colleagues' case that Wallace never actually left the postmodern tradition he claimed to be renouncing, and DeLillo's account of a letter in which Wallace called Infinite Jest his most serious and best work while confessing the pleasure of writing had been replaced by dread and terror.

Key claims

  • The 1995 tape: interviewed in New York at 33, Wallace argues fiction can carry a reader across the wall of self into imagining someone else as no other form can, because people are essentially lonely and frightened of being alone. [00:00–00:01]
  • Later 1995 material: his generation's fears are triteness, sentimentality, mawkishness — where an earlier generation feared giving offense — and irony has become a carapace that shields the speaker from seeming naive; TV and popular culture have everything to do with that shift. Writers who take popular culture as subject are defamiliarizing a mediated world that is trying to sell you something six to eight hours a day; what's at stake is human agency in how we experience the world (his seashore-vs-egret-documentary example). [00:18–00:20, 00:27–00:29]
  • Framing facts from the narration: Infinite Jest described as a thousand-page encyclopedic novel with 388 endnotes; the Pale King publication imminent that April; Wallace wrote to DeLillo after IJ appeared and they corresponded regularly. [00:01, 00:04, 00:23]
  • Bonnie Nadell (agent, literary executor): Wallace left roughly two hundred clean typed pages of The Pale King sitting on his desk as if spotlit, plainly meant to be found; he told his wife to destroy things she didn't think were good — not to destroy everything. She and Karen Green, going through the garage office in Claremont — the spookiest room she has ever been in — kept opening plastic containers and finding more and more pages. [00:04–00:06]
  • Nadell on the halfway house: the Boston halfway-house research brought him people and hardships he would never otherwise have met, and showed him a kind of community he might otherwise never have encountered; loneliness, on her account, was what his writing always worked to escape, and the AA and NA people told their stories with all the craft available to them. [00:17–00:18]
  • Amy Wallace, touring Champaign with the presenter: the flatland grid — 90-degree intersections, tennis on a rectangle — as the geometry he later realized he had ordered himself within; the courtside life-story chapters he inflicted on his young tennis students under a particular tree; tornado season and the family huddled in a hallway (the Easterner parents bought no basement) while David ran outside, saying he'd see it before it picked him up; and her statement that, as far as she knows, the writing began only after the first depressive bout, which seasoned him and left him, once recovered, exhilarated at being able to use his brain to create rather than turn in on himself. [00:07–00:13]
  • Mark Costello (roommate, Signifying Rappers co-author): the breakdowns and the art were related — he'd collapse, then make an explosive jump forward; he was wary of depression as a swallowing subject, and The Depressed Person is almost poem-like in its closed circularity while still being written in a voice that says language can do anything. He rates Girl with Curious Hair the book hardest to touch after the suicide and predicts readers will go to it the way they go to Fitzgerald's Tales of the Jazz Age; the key line of the Westward novella is its tender one — that you are loved. [00:13–00:16]
  • Costello against medicalization: this is not a small melancholy à la the cult of the depressed-poet; The Depressed Person itself eviscerates the cult of depression; depression was the trade wind across his map, but circumstance does not make the whole of a person — the legacy is those 75-word sentences that hold entire worlds. [00:38 region, untimestamped tail]
  • Don DeLillo: Wallace's was a genuinely new voice whose roller-coaster sentences seem built to reflect the enormity of the stimulus around us; his work will always read as youthful. Shortly after finishing IJ, Wallace wrote him a letter calling it the most serious and best work he'd done — while confessing, in terms DeLillo is sure were not exaggerated, that the ordinary pleasure of writing had been replaced by dread and terror. On the reputation: the man and work were unique; when the generation is listed, Wallace stands alone. [00:23–00:27, tail]
  • Rick Moody: the footnoting enacts how Wallace subdivides every thought — no thought complete until more subheadings hang off it; the addiction register is where he and Wallace had a meeting of the minds, and it's why he loved the book first. [00:02–00:03, 00:20–00:21]
  • Curtis White (Normal, Illinois): by 1993 Normal had Dalkey Archive and the Unit for Contemporary Literature, and Wallace was hired into — and wanted — that context; there was a confusion in his reception that he himself fostered by publicly claiming a move away from the postmodern while obviously working inside its playful, innovative tradition; his colleagues just laughed at those statements. [00:29–00:32]
  • Charles Harris (department head who hired him): in Barth, self-referentiality points at the text; in Wallace it becomes the workings of a consciousness laboring to shed its own self — a psychological edge that dominates. He would have loved to write like Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, knew the history of fiction made that impossible, and so tried to have it both ways: technically beyond the postmodernists yet satisfying the traditional need for values. [00:32–00:34]
  • Michael Pietsch (editor): he won the bidding for IJ by telling them that editing this book mattered to him more than breathing; he knew almost nothing of The Pale King before Wallace died (Nadell's few sentences: accounting, boredom, the IRS, tax classes) and was shocked, reading the pages five months later, to find Wallace a character in it; assembly revealed bizarre childhood chapters resolving into IRS examiners converging on Peoria in 1985 for an orientation into vast boredom — tedium survival training. Wallace was deliberately writing the parts readers skip (against Elmore Leonard's rule), the irrelevant complexity most novels compress away; the depth of Wallace's depression, and the medication, were unknown to Pietsch — kept entirely private; he hopes the book is read as fiction rather than combed for psychiatric symptoms. [00:34–00:38, tail]
  • On-air readings from IJ (print homes verified): Hal's lonely-for-something abstraction with its endnote, and the Kate Gompert clinical-depression passage — a hell for one (scene 135); Gately learning that AA speech has to be the truth, unslanted and maximally unironic, with the witch-in-church line (scene 076); the disease-as-spider passage with the counselor's entomologic tropes endnote (scene 074); James Sr.'s tennis-ball-as-ultimate-body monologue, quoted by the narrator as a character's line (scene 049). Also read: the Good Old Neon deathbed self-observation passage, The Pale King's opening prairie paragraph and a Lane Dean rote-tasks passage, and the tornado-tennis passage from the Midwest essay (with the Antitoi name, familiar to IJ readers, in its real-life original). [00:01–00:02, 00:10–00:11, 00:17–00:18, 00:20–00:21, 00:27, 00:33, 00:37–00:38]

Theories & evidence

THEORY: Wallace's great theme is a culture's self-devouring solipsism and its cry for community — IJ is a struggle between the loneliness of addiction and the empathy of community

  • Crux: communication-solipsism
  • Stance: advances
  • Evidence:
    • [text] Hal's abstraction — "That we’re all lonely for something we don’t know we’re lonely for." (n. 281) — read on air with its endnote (print home: scene 135, pp. 692–698). [00:01–00:02]
    • [author] The 1995 tape: fiction's magic is letting a reader leap over the wall of self, because people are essentially lonely and frightened of being alone. [00:00–00:01]
    • [text] The Gately AA-truth passage (scene 076, pp. 367–375) as the community pole; the Kate Gompert hell-for-one passage (scene 135) as the solipsism pole. [00:17–00:18, 00:27]
    • [secondary] Costello: the mature move is why we can't live alone — the Westward material on ghastly intuitions of singularity, ending in solipsism binding us together; the key line of the novella is that you are loved. [00:15–00:16]
    • [secondary] Nadell: the halfway house showed him a community he'd not otherwise have seen; writing was, on her account, his standing route out of loneliness. [00:17–00:18]
  • Notes: This is the documentary's declared organizing thesis (narration names solipsism-vs-community as his great theme), assembled from author tape, readings, and witnesses rather than argued against any rival reading.

THEORY: Irony in Wallace's fiction is the adversary — a formerly useful tool annexed by TV and crass entertainment, with authenticity and sincerity to be recovered

  • Crux: irony-vs-recovery
  • Stance: advances
  • Evidence:
    • [text] The AA passage on speech that must be the truth, unslanted — "And maximally unironic. An ironist in a Boston AA meeting is a witch in church." (p. 369; scene 076, pp. 367–375). [00:17–00:18]
    • [author] 1995 tape: irony as the marvelous carapace against the era's real fears (triteness, sentimentality, naivete); it has ceased to be palliative after 30 years as the culture's mode of discourse. [00:18–00:20]
  • Notes: The narration states the thesis flatly (irony the enemy; sincerity receded but recoverable). No in-source pushback.

THEORY: Wallace never actually left the postmodern tradition — the break-with-postmodernism story was a confusion he himself fostered

  • Crux: sincerity-definition
  • Stance: complicates
  • Evidence:
    • [secondary] Curtis White: Wallace publicly claimed movement away from the postmodern toward the more human (his word, per White), but it was obvious to anybody reading him that he worked in that tradition — his Normal colleagues laughed at the statements, and his choosing Normal (Dalkey Archive, the Unit for Contemporary Literature) proves the comfort. [00:29–00:32]
    • [secondary] Charles Harris: the self-referentiality is real but psychologized — a consciousness at work on shedding its own self; he wanted Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, knew he couldn't, and engineered a both-ways synthesis rather than a departure. [00:32–00:34]
    • [text] The Good Old Neon deathbed passage (a part still calculating, performing) read as the exhibit for psychologized self-reference. [00:33]
  • Notes: The presenter's own gloss sides with the colleagues: the work has more in common with the metafictionists he satirized than with the realism he praised — less a compromise than a synthesis that keeps interrogating itself, a third path. This complicates, from witnesses inside his hiring, the standard he-broke-with-postmodernism narrative that the sincerity readings often assume.

THEORY: IJ's commodification satire is predictive — its savagery undiminished fifteen years on

  • Crux: media-prescience
  • Stance: endorses
  • Evidence:
    • [secondary] Moody: the predictive layer is really allegorical, but the commodification register (subsidized time and the rest) is dramatically right on, and the years since have only confirmed it — things have gotten worse. [00:21–00:22]
    • [inference] Moody: the American political novel has no teeth, but IJ carries a savage rebellion about politics and culture — which is why it displaced the Updike/Roth/Oates generation from the center of American literature. [00:22–00:23]
  • Notes: A 2011 sighting for the prescience ledger, from a novelist peer rather than a tech commentator.

THEORY: AA and halfway-house storytelling gave Wallace his model of community and narrative truth-telling

  • Crux: aa-narrative-form
  • Stance: endorses
  • Evidence:
    • [secondary] Nadell: he met people and hardships otherwise closed to him, saw a community he might not have seen, and learned from hearing people tell their stories with whatever craft they had. [00:17–00:18]
    • [text] The Gately listening-discipline and truth-requirement passage read as the fictional distillation (scene 076, pp. 367–375). [00:18]
  • Notes: Offered as compositional testimony pressed into the documentary's community thesis; Nadell is describing inspiration, not advancing a formal claim about the novel's narration.

THEORY: IJ treats entertainment as the culture's most dangerous drug

  • Crux: anti-entertainment
  • Stance: mentions
  • Evidence:
    • [inference] Narration: the Entertainment cartridge as a MacGuffin so alluring it robs viewers of will — the entertainment industry as the culture's ultimate addiction. [00:27–00:28]
    • [author] 1995 tape: TV as a six-to-eight-hour daily sales pitch and seduction; the mediated world needs defamiliarizing before we lose the ability to want the unmediated thing. [00:28–00:29]
  • Notes: Framing-level only; the documentary does not develop the lethality mechanics or the samizdat plot.

Themes

Communication and solipsism; addiction and recovery (AA truth-telling); entertainment and mediation; depression — and the explicit resistance to reading the work as a psychiatric document; the Midwest, geometry, and tennis as formation; postmodernism and sincerity; boredom and attention (the Pale King segment).

Cross-references

Advances