Three items about what didn't make it into Infinite Jest
TL;DR
Companion to Moore's first-draft essay (The Howling Fantods links the two): Debraski (2011) surveys the three public windows into IJ's cut/changed material — (1) Moore's essay, (2) Michael Pietsch's actual six-page editing letter of 22 Dec 1994, and (3) Newsweek's Nov 2010 photo essay of twenty draft pages from the newly opened DFW archive at the Harry Ransom Center. Useful as a map of what primary draft material a lay reader can actually see.
Key claims
- Confirms/summarizes Moore's central reversal: the famous "300–400 pages cut" story is misleading — the 1993 draft lacked the admissions-office opening, the mold-eating incident, all Marathe/Steeply Arizona scenes, most AFR material, the bricklayer e-mail, videophony, the Bain/Steeply correspondence, Mario's encounter with Millicent Kent, and ~half the endnotes; those were added 1994–95.
- Pietsch letter (item two): the editor read the manuscript twice, sent pages of suggested cuts; Wallace circled "Yes" on several suggestions that nonetheless remain in the published book — the negotiation was messier than either party's later accounts suggest. (Hosted by lazenby / Forever DFW; the IJproject copy of the content exists only as described here — the scans themselves are not archived here.)
- Newsweek scans (item three): twenty pages ≈ six sections, including the young JOI black-widow scene (dated B.S. 1960), Avril's grammar-class exam, draft endnotes 27A–45A (many absent from the book), Enfield Marine material, the "Paulie"/Gordon W. Eagen stem-artist sequence, and the six channel-surf snippets — i.e., scans of the very scenes Moore could only describe. Newsweek's link is dead; Debraski rehosts them.
- Adds one item found nowhere else: in the Lopate radio interview, Wallace mentions a draft idea where China objects to Subsidized Time as a co-opting of its lunar calendar, with the possibility of war — present in no surviving draft material.
Themes
Composition history; editing as collaboration; the gap between draft mythology ("400 pages cut") and documented reality.
Cross-references
- Parent piece: moore-first-draft-ij.
- Pietsch's own retrospective account: infinite-summer-pietsch-editing-ij; the D.T. Max profile reproduces more of the correspondence: dtmax-2009-the-unfinished.
- The Lopate interview is transcribed in this repo: video-lopate-1996 — check the China/lunar-calendar remark against the transcript.