All That

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TL;DR

A short story Wallace published posthumously (The New Yorker, 14 December 2009; never collected). The unnamed narrator, later a seminarian, traces his lifelong "religious feeling" to a childhood toy: a wooden cement mixer whose drum, his parents told him, magically rotated but only when unobserved, stopping the instant he looked. The boy spends months trying to catch it, never wanting to succeed. Around this observer-proof "magic" the story assembles two comforting "voices," fits of near-unbearable ecstasy, a benign "antiparanoia," and a father-son ritual of television-watching. Written in the late-Wallace, Pale King-adjacent register of sincerity and attention, it rhymes with Infinite Jest at three points: pleasure so total it verges on the unbearable, filmed entertainment as the medium of a father-son bond, and reverence toward the unverifiable as the alternative to corrosive skepticism.

Key claims

The magic cement mixer. As a boy of five or six, the narrator is told by his parents that his toy cement mixer's drum rotates — but only when he is not looking, "stopping whenever observed." He devises escalating schemes (sudden whirls, keyholes, mirrors, incremental head-turns "at the rate of the hour hand", a photograph with masking tape on the drum) to catch it, and never does. The drum is in fact "glued or nailed" fast and cannot turn at all.
He never wanted to succeed. As an adult the narrator realizes he tried so hard to catch the drum precisely "to verify that I could not"; success would have crushed him. The magic he revered was not rotation but unobservability itself — "the way it knew to stop the instant I tried to see it."
Reverence as a stance. The toy is "the origin of the religious feeling that has informed most of my adult life." The narrator defines reverence as the natural attitude toward "magical, unverifiable phenomena," opposed to the "respect" or "obedience" owed to observable things — and defines atheism, by contrast, as "a kind of anti-religious religion, which worships reason, skepticism, intellect, empirical proof".
Voices, ecstasy, antiparanoia. As a child he heard two distinct, benign "voices," and suffered fits of ecstasy so intense they were "almost too intense" to bear, associated with late-afternoon sunlight reaching "moments of immanence." His father jokes that the boy has a benign psychosis, "antiparanoia," a belief that the universe conspires to make him happy.
The father, the television, the war movie. The narrator's warmest childhood memory is watching television with his father, his head on a pillow on his father's knees. The story ends on a 1950s war movie whose lieutenant throws himself on a grenade — and on the fact that the narrator and his father, years later, remember the movie's crucial act incompatibly (the hero dies saving his own platoon, or dies saving the enemy), a divergence the narrator finds disturbing.

Theories & evidence

Wallace's own fiction advances no theory about Infinite Jest; what follows records continuities of preoccupation between this story and the novel — rhymes rather than prefigurations, since "All That" postdates Infinite Jest by thirteen years.

CONNECTION: Pleasure and beauty so total they verge on the unbearable — the near-fatal ecstasy that Infinite Jest literalizes in the lethal Entertainment

Crux: none
Early text: The narrator's fits of ecstasy are "sometimes so much so that it was almost too intense for me", triggered by sunlight that "achieved moments of immanence and became the color of beaten gold"; the war-movie's sacrificial death he "regarded as not only “heroic” but also beautiful in a way that was almost too intense to bear". [one-paragraph story]
IJ echo: The Entertainment — the cartridge whose pleasure is literally fatal, reducing its viewer to inert bliss (the medical attaché settling in before the unlabeled cartridge, scene 007, pp. 33-37; the viewers reported out of commission altogether, scene 029, pp. 87-92).
Weight: shared-preoccupation
Notes: The continuity is the idea of a pleasure/beauty at the very edge of what a self can survive. In "All That" it is benign, an "agony of delight"; in Infinite Jest the same structure — total, self-erasing absorption — is turned lethal. The story is the harmless twin of the novel's central danger.

CONNECTION: Filmed entertainment as the medium of the father-son bond

Crux: none
Early text: The narrator's closest bond with his father is formed in front of the television — "usually took place on the couch," the boy lying "with my head on a pillow on my father’s knees" — and the story climaxes on a war movie the two watched together and now remember differently.
IJ echo: James Incandenza and Hal — the filmmaker father whose relationship to his son runs through screens and staged scenes; the professional-conversationalist episode, in which the disguised J.O.I., convinced his son never speaks, cannot hear Hal talking right in front of him (scene 005, pp. 27-32).
Weight: shared-preoccupation
Notes: Both texts locate the father-son relationship in filmed/mediated space and in its failures of transmission (in "All That," the two remember the movie's meaning incompatibly; in Infinite Jest, J.O.I.'s attempts to reach Hal through media and disguise misfire — the father cannot register the son's actual speech). Continuity of preoccupation, not of plot.

CONNECTION: Reverence toward the unverifiable, against corrosive skepticism — the stance Infinite Jest's AA doctrine also recommends

Crux: none
Early text: The story's explicit thesis is that "the most powerful and significant connections in our lives are (at the time) invisible to us", which the narrator takes as "a compelling argument for religious reverence rather than skeptical empiricism"; the magic he prizes "could not, not ever, be trapped or outsmarted."
IJ echo: The Boston AA / White Flag doctrine of surrender — that the program works whether or not you believe or understand it, and that analysis is the enemy of recovery (scene 074, pp. 343-367).
Weight: shared-preoccupation
Notes: The rhyme is between the story's religious epistemology (revere the unverifiable; do not try to catch or outsmart the magic) and Infinite Jest's AA wisdom — surrender to a Higher Power you cannot verify (scene 074), the slogan-level distrust of thinking your way out ("Keep It Simple", scene 076; the fellowship's "Analysis-Paralysis", scene 056). Both prefer disciplined reverence to the acid of empirical self-consciousness. No novel crux is scoped; thematic continuity only.

Themes

Religion and reverence (the story's subject); the observer effect and the unverifiable (the magic that stops when watched — a conceit resonant with Infinite Jest's world of the watched and the barely-observable); attention and ecstasy (pleasure at the edge of endurance); family and the father-son bond (mediated through television); communication and its failures (the incompatible memories of the same movie). Register: the late-Wallace sincerity of The Pale King years — flat, self-correcting, attention as a spiritual discipline.

Cross-references

oblivion-good-old-neon and oblivion-suffering-channel — the nearest neighbors in Wallace's late short fiction; shared preoccupation with interiority, sincerity, and the limits of self-knowledge.
broom-of-the-system — for the recurring father/parent-installs-a-belief motif (the child's mind shaped by an adult's "tall tale").
In the novel: scenes 007 / 029 (the Entertainment's fatal bliss, pp. 33-37, 87-92); scene 005 (J.O.I. as professional conversationalist failing to reach young Hal, pp. 27-32); scene 074 (Boston AA / White Flag surrender doctrine, pp. 343-367).

Notable passages

The observer-proof magic: "the magic was not just that the drum of a solid wood object without batteries rotated but that it did so only when unobserved, stopping whenever observed."
What the narrator actually revered: "The magic was the way it knew to stop the instant I tried to see it."
The story's thesis: "The toy cement mixer is the origin of the religious feeling that has informed most of my adult life."
Reverence defined: it is "the natural attitude to take toward magical, unverifiable phenomena".
Antiparanoia: the boy suffers "a type of benign psychosis called “antiparanoia,”" a conviction that the universe conspires to make him happy.
The voices: "these voices were—or appeared to me as—entirely real and autonomous phenomena".