\"At the edges of perception\": William Gaddis and the encyclopedic novel from Joyce to David Foster Wallace

TL;DR

Stephen Burn's 2001 Durham PhD thesis — the doctoral study whose fourth chapter became the seed of his standard IJ Reader's Guide (2003/2012). The thesis argues that American postmodernism did not, as its critics claimed, abandon the big encyclopedic novel for minimalism; through readings of four encyclopedic novels (Gaddis's The Recognitions, DeLillo's Underworld, Powers's The Gold Bug Variations, and Wallace's Infinite Jest) it traces a living Joyce-to-Wallace line. For this archive the value is the IJ chapter, "Immanent Domain," where the positions the Reader's Guide later made canonical appear in their earliest dated form — the YDAU = 2009 derivation, the ninety-sections-mirror-the-film reading, the wraith-as-co-author theory of the novel's narration — and, crucially, where some of those positions are still more tentative or differently weighted than the Guide would make them: the thesis leaves Hal's end-state an open three-way question rather than settling on A.F.R. capture, and it loads the wraith with far more of the narration than the Guide later would. It is also the archive's fullest account of IJ as an "encyclopedia of the postmodern novel" and of its DeLillo debts (End Zone, Great Jones Street, Ratner's Star).

Key claims

The encyclopedic-novel thesis (Introduction + Chapter Four frame)

• The received story — modernism wrote encyclopedic masterworks, postmodern America wrote short — is wrong: there is "a large number of artistically sophisticated contemporary novels of encyclopedic scope" continuous with Ulysses. Against Sven Birkerts, John Aldridge, and Granta's 1996 "Best of Young American Novelists" (which omitted both Powers and Wallace), Burn offers IJ as proof the encyclopedic novel was still vital in the nineties.
• IJ is chosen for the final chapter because it "represents something like an encyclopedia of the postmodern novel": it runs postmodern techniques (metafiction, infinite regress), engages postmodern themes (ontological uncertainty, television), and name-checks Barth, Kosinski, Burroughs, Pynchon.
• It meets Edward Mendelson's criteria for encyclopedic narrative: a central cultural role (the fullest analysis of televisual culture in the contemporary novel — "a thorough anthropology of television advertising"); an account of a science (its pharmacology); an art outside written fiction (its cinematography sections); and the "encyclopedia of literary styles" of its lists, mini-essays, e-mails, and first-person voices from street language to Hal's lexical prose.
• The chapter title, "Immanent Domain," is lifted from a film in the novel about three memory-neurons fighting displacement during a man's psychoanalysis (n.24) — teasingly close to Richard Ellmann's Eminent Domain, and used to frame the whole question of literary influence and belatedness.

Chronology: YDAU = 2009 (the derivation, in its earliest dated form)

• Burn derives the timeline exactly as the later Guide will: one endnote dates the M.I.T. Language Riots to "B.S. [before subsidisation] 1997" (n.24), a second (footnoting a YDAU section) calls them "twelve years past" (n.60) — "therefore subsidization began with 2002, and Y.D.A.U. is 2009," with Year of Glad = 2010. He corrects Tom LeClair's "about 2015". A fifty-year span is covered, 1960 to Nov 2010, with most action 3-20 November 2009.
• Character datings given cite-as-written: Hal born June 1992, 17 in YDAU; James O. Incandenza born 1950, "committed suicide on 1 April 2005 at the age of 54"; Avril (née Mondragon) born 1953, 56 in YDAU. (The 2005 suicide dating differs from the 1 April 2004 / Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar mapping that Burn's later Guide and this archive use — recorded here as the thesis states it, not corrected.)
• The riots are also a DeLillo in-joke: J. Graham Hummer is "the instigator of the MIT language riots" in Ratner's Star, and Burn notes "97 is a mirror image of 79 - the year Ratner's Star is set."

Structure: ninety sections mirror the ninety-day film shoot

• Counting section breaks (capitalised headings; breaks after a list [p. 223] or a letter [p. 666]; circle dividers), Burn finds "ninety clearly defined sections," paralleling James Incandenza's spending "the whole sober last ninety days of his animate life" making the film "Infinite Jest" (IJ 838). He infers that Wallace "relegate[d] some sections of the narrative (see, for example, 787n324) to the endnotes" specifically to hold the count at exactly ninety. This is the same reading the Guide publishes — originating here in 2001.

The ending and the "missing year" (more agnostic than the Guide)

• The whole plot "hinges on events that take place in the missing year between November 2009 and November 2010." Burn lays out the candidates for Hal's Year-of-Glad collapse without ranking one strongest: progressive marijuana-withdrawal and anhedonia; the "temporally-cerebral and almost ontological[ly]" disturbing drug DMZ that "grows only on . . . mold" (hence Hal's opening flashback to eating "a large patch of mold"); or that Hal has watched "Infinite Jest."
• On the grave-dig ("John N. R. Wayne . . . standing watch in a mask as Donald Gately and I dig up my father's head," IJ 16-17): Burn notes Wayne is "implied" to be working for the Canadian insurgents (IJ 726) and that a cartridge was "apparently buried" with Incandenza's head — but he stops short of the Guide's later claim that A.F.R. capture is "the most likely" reading: in the thesis, "none of this is confirmed." Orin's role (mailing the film as revenge for the cuckolding, per the insurgents' belief at IJ 723; or incest-jealousy of Avril, IJ 791) is left open.

The wraith as co-author: a theory of the whole narration

• Burn's most developed IJ argument, and the one the later Guide underweights: the wraith of James Incandenza (IJ 831) cannot speak aloud — it "had to use somebody's like internal brain-voice", so "thoughts and insights … coming from some wraith always just sound like your own thoughts from inside your own head." Burn takes this "far beyond the simple level of plot to profoundly influence the narrative throughout the book."
• Evidence: the narrator's fastidious ownership-of-words markers — "A lot of these are his own terms" of a LaMont Chu section (IJ 388); the endnote that "Pemulis doesn’t actually literally say ‘breath and bread’" (n.130) — read, after the wraith revelation, as signs of a more complicated narrative structure. Mario's "word periodic pops into his head" while Joelle broadcasts (IJ 190), and he "thinks of the word haunting", placing the dead father's ghost beside him; Joelle's on-air name, Madame Psychosis, is "temptingly similar to "metempsychosis."" So Hal's observation that Mario gets his cartridge fetish "from their late father" (IJ 396) becomes "not simply an observation but literally true" (the pun is Burn's) — the "Himself-influenced" films "less like imitations than collaborations," the ghost of the forerunner returning to continue the work. This makes the wraith Burn's emblem for the novel's whole problem of belatedness and influence (one's "best thoughts were really communiques from the patient and Abiding dead", IJ 923).

Infinity, infinite regress, and the hypertext form

• IJ approaches "the infinite of its title" by "infinite regress": the tattoo of a hand tattooed with a breast and hand (IJ 207), "framed frames" (IJ 229), and the "annular" fusion physics Incandenza helped found — "a type of fusion that can produce waste that's fuel for a process whose waste is fuel for the fusion" (IJ 572), an infinite loop. The number eight (the lemniscate ∞) recurs suggestively — eight people in the opening scene, Orin's "infinity signs" traced on lovers, his football number 71 (digits summing to eight).
• Anticipating Petrassi's later claim exactly, Burn reads IJ's endnotes as a "print equivalent of hypertext": forced to jump between text and endnote, and through endnotes within endnotes, the reader experiences the novel "a little bit like" a hyperfiction — Robert Coover's "network of alternate paths".

DeLillo, the deepest debt (fuller here than in the Guide)

• The novel IJ "most resembles … is DeLillo's sports novel End Zone": both feature college athletes, trainee sportscasters (Jim Troeltsch / Raymond Toon), coaches who withdraw to a tower for "godlike omniscience" (Schtitt / Emmett Creed), and players lured by "promises of self-transcendence"; the two even seem to argue about football-as-warfare across the decades (Marlon Bain, IJ 1047n269, vs. End Zone 164).
• Hal's speech-loss echoes the language-sector "mind drug" that silences Bucky Wunderlick in Great Jones Street ("You won't be able to make words … Sounds galore. But no words"). Pynchon ("in The Zone," IJ 242, 256; Mondragon ~ Mondaugen; the acknowledged Gravity's Rainbow "Brockengespenst"), Barth (Incandenza's film "Mobius Strips"), Burroughs, and Kosinski are all alluded to.

Biography, reception, and the author-in-the-text

• A compact DFW biography (b. Ithaca 1962; Amherst summa cum laude 1985; Arizona MFA; Harvard philosophy grad work) frames a walk through Broom, Girl with Curious Hair, the "manifesto" essays ("Fictional Futures"; the "Great Male Narcissists" of "Updike"), and E Unibus Pluram — television's assimilation of postmodern irony and the closing call for anti-rebels who "treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions … with reverence and conviction" (Fun 81), read as feeding directly into IJ.
• Reception: Burn cites the hostile reviews IJ drew for its length — Lisa Schwarzbaum ("Skimming isn't possible"); Dale Peck's LRB pan, "an act of literary sadism", "bloated, boring, gratuitous, and - perhaps especially - uncontrolled," a novel "'not worth the paper it's written on' … in at least an ecological sense" (and notes Peck is "casual about the novel's chronology"). He records the real Katherine A. Gompert libel suit (a former junior tennis player sued Wallace over the character's name; Wallace lost, defending on "the special status of the author").

Theories & evidence

THEORY: Infinite Jest is a fully achieved encyclopedic novel — the "encyclopedia of the postmodern novel" — continuing, not abandoning, the Joyce-Gaddis-DeLillo line

• Crux: encyclopedic-design
• Stance: advances
• Evidence:
  • [secondary] Meets Mendelson's encyclopedic criteria: central cultural role via "a thorough anthropology of television advertising"; a science (pharmacology); an art outside fiction (cinematography); an "encyclopedia of literary styles." [ch. 4, pp. 193-94]
  • [text] Runs postmodern techniques (metafiction, infinite regress) and name-checks Barth, Kosinski, Burroughs, Pynchon — "an encyclopedia of the postmodern novel". [intro, p. 14]
  • [text] Infinite-regress figures: the recursive tattoo (IJ 207), "framed frames" (IJ 229), the annular fusion loop (IJ 572); the recurring lemniscate "eight." [ch. 4, p. 199]
• Notes: The organizing frame of the whole thesis. Counterweight the source itself raises: Wallace "claimed that he is not particularly interested 'in trying to lace the book with allusions to other texts'" ("Transcript" 32) — recorded by Burn even as he catalogues the allusions.

THEORY: The novel's third-person narration is pervasively shaped by the wraith of James Incandenza, who plants words in characters' (and the narrator's) minds — so the "narrator" is in part the returning dead author

• Crux: ij-narrator
• Stance: advances
• Evidence:
  • [text] The wraith "had to use somebody's like internal brain-voice", so its thoughts "just sound like your own thoughts from inside your own head" (IJ 831). [ch. 4, p. 195]
  • [text] Ownership-of-words markers reread after that revelation: "A lot of these are his own terms" (IJ 388); "Pemulis doesn’t actually literally say ‘breath and bread’" (n.130). [ch. 4, p. 196]
  • [text] Mario's unbidden "periodic" / "haunting" beside Joelle's broadcast (IJ 190-191); "Madame Psychosis" ~ "metempsychosis"; Hal's observation about the "Himself-influenced" cartridges becomes "literally true"; the films are collaborations. [ch. 4, p. 197]
• Notes: Distinctively, the 2001 thesis gives the wraith MORE narrative load than Burn's later Reader's Guide, which the archive records as giving the wraith markedly less narrative load and reading the ending as A.F.R.-driven rather than wraith-driven. The thesis frames the wraith as the emblem of the novel's belatedness/influence theme, not primarily as an ending-mechanic.

THEORY: Hal's Year-of-Glad condition and the events of the "missing year" are left genuinely undecided — marijuana-withdrawal, DMZ, or having watched the Entertainment are all live, none ranked strongest

• Crux: hal-condition
• Stance: entertains
• Evidence:
  • [text] Progressive marijuana-withdrawal and anhedonia; Hal begins to "perceive things very intensely" (IJ 896) and loses facial control. [ch. 4, p. 190]
  • [text] DMZ, which "grows only on . . . mold" (IJ 170), tied to the opening flashback of eating "a large patch of mold" (IJ 10). [ch. 4, p. 190]
  • [text] Or Hal has watched "Infinite Jest"; the grave-dig (IJ 16-17), with Wayne "implied" to serve the Canadian insurgents (IJ 726) and a cartridge "apparently buried" with the head. [ch. 4, pp. 190-91]
• Notes: KEY DIFFERENCE from the later Guide, which commits to A.F.R. capture as "the most likely" reading of the ending. In 2001 Burn concludes only that "none of this is confirmed" and the plot "hinges on … the missing year" — an early, deliberately open sighting; the later hardening (the DMZ-in-food manuscript notes, the Wayne/A.F.R. link) belongs to the Guide's archive work. Touches hal-dmz without ranking it.

THEORY: The chronology is fixed and deducible — Y.D.A.U. = 2009, subsidised time from 2002, Year of Glad = 2010

• Crux: ydau-real-year
• Stance: advances
• Evidence:
  • [text] Cross-referencing the two riots endnotes ("B.S. 1997," n.24; "twelve years past," n.60): "therefore subsidization began with 2002, and Y.D.A.U. is 2009." [ch. 4, p. 187 n.20]
  • [secondary] Corrects LeClair's "about 2015" (Prodigious Fiction 31) as a factual error. [ch. 4, p. 188 n.20]
• Notes: The earliest dated statement of the derivation the archive's chronology names — it originates in the 2001 thesis, not the 2003 Guide. The thesis dates JOI's suicide to 1 April 2005, where the later Guide and this archive use 1 April 2004 — a thesis-vs-Guide variance, recorded as written.

THEORY: The novel is structured in ninety sections mirroring the ninety-day composition of the film "Infinite Jest"

• Crux: annular-structure
• Stance: advances
• Evidence:
  • [text] "[N]inety clearly defined sections" by Burn's break-counting criteria, paralleling JOI's "whole sober last ninety days of his animate life" making the film (IJ 838). [ch. 4, p. 187 n.18]
  • [inference] Wallace inferred to have "relegate[d] some sections … to the endnotes" (e.g. 787n324) to hold the count at ninety. [ch. 4, p. 187 n.18]
• Notes: Same reading the Guide publishes; earliest dated form. Greg Carlisle's later 192-section count uses different break-counting criteria (see Cross-references) — a methods difference, not a contradiction.

THEORY: Television's assimilation of postmodern irony is the central cultural problem IJ is built to answer — the film literalizes entertainment's lure of "engagement without demand"

• Crux: entertainment-lethality
• Stance: endorses
• Evidence:
  • [author] Via E Unibus Pluram: television "takes elements of the postmodern … and bends them to the ends of spectation and consumption" (Fun 64); television's lure of "engagement without demand". [ch. 4, pp. 184-85]
  • [text] The film's genesis — Incandenza wanting "[s]omething the boy would love enough to induce him to open his mouth" (IJ 838-39). [ch. 4, p. 190]
  • [author] The closing anti-rebels call (Fun 81) read as IJ's own program: earnest treatment of "plain old untrendy human troubles". [ch. 4, p. 185]
• Notes: Burn's entertainment reading is routed through the essay-nexus he would later (in the 2nd-ed Guide) argue criticism must outgrow — here in 2001 he leans on it heavily.

Themes

Encyclopedic-novel tradition and its 1990s vitality; influence, belatedness, and originality (the wraith as figure for all three); the novel's structure as meaning (ninety sections, the deducible calendar); the ending and the missing year; Hal's deterioration; television, entertainment, and irony (E Unibus Pluram); the DeLillo debt; the novel-versus-hypertext question.

Cross-references

• The doctoral seed-bed of Burn's Infinite Jest Reader's Guide: the chronology derivation, the ninety-section reading, and the wraith material all appear here first (2001), and in places more tentatively — the ending is left an open three-way question rather than settled on A.F.R. capture, and the wraith carries more of the narration. Burn also edited Conversations with David Foster Wallace.
• The wraith-as-co-author reading is the scholarly ancestor of the archive's narration debates; sits beside Chris Hager's "On Speculation" (Burn cites Hager on idiom attaching to the nearest character) and the manuscript work in moore-first-draft-ij.
• The encyclopedic-novel frame connects to Theuwis's quest-for-the-encyclopedic-postmodern reading and Boswell's Understanding David Foster Wallace (Burn's fellow 2003 study).
• The reception layer: Burn quotes Dale Peck's LRB pan and stands with Kakutani's flagship review among the length-focused responses; both are in the archive.
• The hypertext-form reading is anticipated whole in this 2001 chapter and restated in Petrassi's Infinite Scroll essay (endnotes as proto-hypertext).
• The infinity/lemniscate material connects to the math strand: larb-infinite-proofs-math-dfw, bfn-math-melodrama.
• The section-count question: Carlisle and Burn side by side.
• Structure and Hamlet: structure-and-hamlet; the ending: the-ending; entertainment: entertainment-and-the-self; irony: irony-and-sincerity.

Notable passages

Verbatim from the thesis (Burn's prose unless marked; obvious scanning artifacts in names and the novel's initials are regularized here).

• On the chapter's aim: IJ "demonstrates the continuing vitality into the nineties of the encyclopedic novel that Birkerts and Aldridge fail to find in their nostalgic surveys".
• On the derivation: "therefore subsidization began with 2002, and Y.D.A.U. is 2009." (footnote 20)
• On structure: "Wallace's new map of the world is outlined in ninety clearly defined sections and is strongly centred around mystery."
• On the wraith: a wraith "had to use somebody's like internal brain-voice … which was why thoughts and insights that were coming from some wraith always just sound like your own thoughts from inside your own head" (quoting IJ 831).
• On the missing year: "none of this is confirmed and so, the entire plot of the novel hinges on events that take place in the missing year between November 2009 and November 2010."
• On form: reading IJ "becomes a kind of print equivalent of hypertext's complicated web of linkages."
• On the DeLillo debt: "The novel which Infinite Jest most resembles, however, is DeLillo's sports novel End Zone."
• Quoting Peck: Wallace's novel "represented 'an act of literary sadism'".