IJ study archive

David Foster Wallace and the Harry Ransom Center (CultureMap Austin, five-part series, July 2011)

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TL;DR

A five-part series that CultureMap Austin ran daily the week of July 25–29, 2011, by Samantha Pitchel, surveying the Harry Ransom Center's recently purchased David Foster Wallace archive one year into its life as a working collection. It is the fullest popular-press account of the early reading-room culture around the papers: the "literary tourists" and scholars (Matt Bucher, Eric Whiteside, curator Molly Schwartzburg) who describe holding the handwritten Infinite Jest pages, the private self-scoldings pencilled in their margins, Wallace's fanatical annotation and teaching habits, his correspondence with the novel's translators, and the archive's turn toward rounding out one of the Center's thematic "nodes" with The Pale King and related acquisitions. Its value is as a rare on-the-ground reception document rather than an interpretive one: it advances no theory about the novel's plot puzzles, and its only claim touching an interpretive question is the autobiographical one — whether the recovery material grows out of Wallace's own life — which it entertains through the draft marginalia while hosting, in the same breath, the caution that closeness to the papers is not closeness to the man.

Key claims

  • The acquisition and its effect (Pt 1): the Center bought Wallace's library in 2010, an acquisition that "earned the HRC an unpredictably massive amount of publicity"; "The popularity of the collection has certainly raised our profile," says Schwartzburg, the Cline Curator of Literature. Bucher, administrator of the Wallace-L discussion group, reports the reading room is routinely crowded with Wallace researchers — "there's someone else who's already requested the box and is sitting right there".
  • Scale of the book (Pt 1): the series describes Infinite Jest as a "staggering 1,079 pages, which includes 388 annotations" — a popular-press figure for the novel's length and endnote count, offered in passing.
  • The DeLillo–Wallace letters (Pt 1): Don DeLillo's papers, also at the HRC, hold one half of "a recently completed puzzle" — the correspondence between the two writers, with Wallace as the younger fan.
  • The marginalia as unguarded self-writing (Pt 2): visitors describe finding, in the handwritten Infinite Jest draft, tiny marginal notes unrelated to the page — "I am a meaningless person," and "I'm scared to death. I am a MacArthur fellow, I feel like I could throw up" (Whiteside); Bucher lists margin jottings "like 'I am sad,' 'I love Mary Karr,' and notes about AA meetings." Because Wallace "never publicly discussed or wrote about his own addictions or depression", the series frames the archive as his most private layer.
  • The Mary Karr tattoo (Pt 2): the widely reported detail that a heart-circled "Mary" was inked on Wallace's arm during his relationship with Mary Karr, later amended after his marriage to Karen Green by "adding an asterisked footnote below: '*Karen.'"
  • Bustillos's self-help-library visit (Pt 2): "writer Maria Bustillos visited the HRC with a very specific mission: to explore a set of self-help books", following Wallace's reading of pop-psychology paperbacks (e.g. The Drama of the Gifted Child) and their family-referring marginalia. The series records Bustillos's own unease — she "felt very bad… thinking how this literary sleuthing is also just prying" — while judging the reading ultimately illuminating. (This is the essay whose fallout is the subject of the Statesman restriction report; see Cross-references.)
  • The skeptical counter-position (Pt 2): the series also carries the guarded view that one should keep "academic distance," since there is no way of “knowing whether notes about "DW" are self-referential or perhaps notes on the fictionalized David Wallace” (the character in "Good Old Neon" and The Pale King); it quotes Justine Tal Goldberg in the Texas Observer: "the question is not what we can understand about Wallace from the archive, but what we can't."
  • Staley's collecting philosophy (Pt 3): director Thomas F. Staley told The New Yorker in 2007: "Ten percent of an archive represents ninety percent of its value." The series presents the heavily annotated Wallace library as the exemplary case.
  • A partial, hand-picked library (Pt 3): Schwartzburg explains the HRC "only received 300 of Wallace's books" because the estate "gave away a lot of unmarked-up books" first, so the collection is "the most heavily annotated of all our author libraries by far".
  • Cross-pollination in the margins (Pt 3): Whiteside reports that additional notes for the Harper's cruise essay ("Shipping Out") turned up written inside Wallace's copy of Joseph Frank's Dostoyevsky biography, which he was reading on the cruise — "when you look in the Dostoyevsky bio… there's tons of information about the cruise". Early Pale King ideas (character Leonard Stecyk) surface on book covers and in margins as early as 1996–97.
  • Wallace the teacher (Pt 4): "a notoriously hard-assed but irresistibly personable professor, a tobacco chewer who kept a spit-filled cup on his desk and gave his home address to students"; his obsession with usage earned him a seat on the American Heritage Dictionary usage board. Whiteside reads the recurring marginal "do" as a teaching instruction — "the smoking gun here is page 140 of Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, where he actually wrote 'do in class.'"
  • Composition and translation of Infinite Jest (Pt 4): the Infinite Jest folders "especially illustrate" Wallace's process — the novel "faced heavy edits," with Wallace supplying justifications for preserving or cutting passages, marking a printed copy's errors for correction, and fielding translators' questions. He is described "responding to questions from the translators, especially the Italians," parsing words like "nerd" and "wedgie" ("there's no such thing as a wedgie in Italy") and warning that a fix could "kill the whole connotative value of it." Biographer D.T. Max is quoted: "[i]n an archive, the analogy between an author's literary and physical remains is inescapable."
  • The paperback errata document (Pt 2, image captions): the collection includes a bound "Corrections of Typos/Errors for Paperback Printing of Infinite Jest" that Wallace sent to Nona Krug and Michael Pietsch; a captioned page shows him correcting "the age of one of the characters in the book."
  • Completing the node (Pt 5): with Staley retiring August 31, 2011, Schwartzburg describes ongoing Wallace-related acquisitions — "we just got Bonnie Nadell's agent correspondence" plus "a set of usage ballots from the dictionary for whom he sat on the usage board." Preservation concerns are driving digitization, but "because of copyright, none of that material will be visible" outside the reading room. The Pale King manuscript — "unfinished at the time of Wallace's death" and then edited by Michael Pietsch, "who whittled the novel down to a publishable 560 pages" — is due back to the HRC after the paperback release.

Theories & evidence

The series is journalism about the archive and its reception, not literary argument; nearly all of its content is biographical, compositional, or institutional and lives in Key claims above. It engages exactly one genuinely interpretive question — whether Infinite Jest's addiction and recovery material is autobiographical — and it does so ambivalently.

THEORY: The archive's private marginalia reveal that Infinite Jest's addiction/recovery material grows out of Wallace's own life

  • Crux: ij-autobiographical
  • Stance: entertains
  • Evidence:
    • [draft] Handwritten Infinite Jest draft, marginal notes reported by Whiteside: "I am a meaningless person," and "I'm scared to death. I am a MacArthur fellow, I feel like I could throw up." [Pt 2]
    • [draft] Infinite Jest manuscript margins per Bucher: jottings "like 'I am sad,' 'I love Mary Karr,' and notes about AA meetings." [Pt 2]
    • [secondary] The series' framing that researchers work to connect the many images of "recovery group culture in his work with his real-life stints in hospitals and halfway houses around Boston", where Wallace lived while studying philosophy at Harvard and teaching writing at Emerson College. [Pt 2]
    • [secondary] Schwartzburg's observation that Wallace scholars feel "an emotional connection to Wallace… deeply entwined with an intellectual connection", experiencing the manuscripts as "very personal." [Pt 2]
  • Notes: The source itself raises the counter-position and does not treat the autobiographical reading as settled. Pt 2 warns against "the illusive promise that closeness to these primary materials equals closeness to the author himself", noting there is “no way of knowing whether notes about "DW" are self-referential or perhaps notes on the fictionalized David Wallace”, and quotes Goldberg: "the question is not what we can understand about Wallace from the archive, but what we can't." Bustillos's recorded unease ("this literary sleuthing is also just prying") is part of the same in-source hesitation. The evidence is archival marginalia, not textual argument about the novel; it bears on authorial biography, and the series presents it as suggestive rather than probative.

Themes

Addiction and recovery (the halfway-house and AA substrate, here approached through the manuscript margins); the persona and privacy of the author (a writer who never publicly discussed his depression, read most intimately through his most guarded writing); teaching, grammar and usage (the classroom annotations, the dictionary usage board); composition and revision (the heavily edited Infinite Jest folders, the translation correspondence, the paperback errata); and the ethics of literary fandom and archival study — the "prying" question that runs under the whole series.

Cross-references

  • theawl-bustillos-self-help-library — the self-help-library essay whose HRC visit the series describes (Pt 2); Bustillos's "prying" line is quoted from that work's context.
  • The Awl follow-up on the self-help books later restricted (theawl-bustillos-self-help-removed), and the Austin American-Statesman report of that restriction (statesman-gross-ransom-center-restricts), are the darker sequel to this series' celebratory open-archive picture: the same marginalia the series treats as revealing were, two months later, pulled from public access at the family's request.
  • newyorker-walls-tax-classes — the same MacArthur-fellowship marginalia that appears here in the Infinite Jest draft margins ("I am a MacArthur fellow, I feel like I could throw up") reappears, almost verbatim, in Wallace's Pale King accounting notebooks ("I am a MacArthur Fellow. Boy am I scared. I feel like throwing up"); the two archive reports converge on the same anxiety.
  • mcnally-making-of-ij-nadell-pietsch — the Nadell agent correspondence and Pietsch editing letters this series reports the HRC acquiring (Pts 2, 5) are the same editorial layer that note treats in depth.

Notable passages

  • Whiteside, on the handwritten Infinite Jest draft: "there's this little, tiny handwriting up in the margin, and he writes: 'I am a meaningless person.'"
  • Bucher: "He's got stuff in the margins like 'I am sad,' 'I love Mary Karr,' and notes about AA meetings. You really get a sense of someone struggling to produce this massive work of art."
  • Staley: "Ten percent of an archive represents ninety percent of its value."
  • Whiteside, on the teaching annotations: "the smoking gun here is page 140 of Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, where he actually wrote 'do in class.'"
  • Schwartzburg: "I would say that the Wallace library is the most heavily annotated of all our author libraries by far, and it's most distinctive for that quality."
  • D.T. Max: "[i]n an archive, the analogy between an author's literary and physical remains is inescapable."
  • Goldberg (Texas Observer), quoted in Pt 2: "the question is not what we can understand about Wallace from the archive, but what we can't."

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