IJ study archive

The Great Concavity Ep. 4: Corrie Baldauf on the Infinite Jest color-tab project (late 2015)

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TL;DR

Interview (late 2015) with Detroit-area artist Corrie Baldauf, who tab-flagged every color reference in Infinite Jest — over 2,400 of them — across multiple physical copies, a project profiled in Hyperallergic and used on the cover of Clare Hayes-Brady's monograph. The color census itself is guest-expertise the archive has nowhere else, and the episode throws off two genuinely useful side claims: hard frequency data on Wallace's palette, and Bucher's report of a Pietsch remark implying the other child narrators of The Pale King map to specific adult IRS characters. ASR transcript: paraphrase only; names corrected (Baldauf, Pietsch, Jenni Baker, Hayes-Brady, Bough Down).

Key claims

  • The Infinite Jest Project: Baldauf began IJ on friends' insistence, stalled, read Atwood's The Blind Assassin (dense with color), and returned to IJ using color-coded page tabs as a focusing device — one tab in the margin per color reference. By ~p. 250 (ASR, approximate) she no longer needed the crutch but continued as an obsession/art project; she was on her third full tabbed copy (mid-400s) at recording, and rereads genuinely each time — she insists mechanically copying tab positions would be impossible and pointless, since the ritual rereading is the project.
  • Frequency data from the census: white is Wallace's most-used color in IJ (her white tabs kept running out), black second, red and blue third/fourth in an order she forgets; total color references over 2,400. She explicitly debunks a blog claim that blue is the only color referenced in the book. Her noun+color log ran so long it would take a ream of paper to print.
  • Read-aloud demonstration from ~p. 651 (ASR, approximate): a rapid-fire run of colors — swollen black eyes, "black sail," yellow Vespa, "blue autumn glory" (p. 652), "fuchsia ski cap" (p. 653), green windscreens/sedan, gray and red — capped by the line about the sun being hard to believe it's "the same sun" over all parts of the planet; the extracted list reads as one enormous found poem (the hosts connect this to Jenni Baker's Erasing Infinite erasure-poetry project; Baldauf submitted color-list found poems to Baker's Found Poetry Review and suspects Baker subtweeted them as "just long lists").
  • Bucher's parallel motif-hunting history: pre-2001 he manually tracked moons in IJ (reading the circular section-header symbols as moons, plus the cover sky) over months; getting a searchable PDF c. 2001 made motif-hunting (moons, masks) trivial and killed the pleasure — an argument that the labor of analog close reading, not just the result, is the point, and a microcosm of what electronic text did to book art.
  • Book-as-body: a Q&A questioner at the 2015 conference framed carrying/ handling IJ as handling Wallace's body (with an intimate/sexual charge). Bucher flatly doesn't buy it — he accepts the older endnotes-as-tennis-match back-and-forth reading instead; Laird counter-offers "his brain": IJ as carrying part of Wallace's mind, the author you feel you know personally by the end.
  • IJ-20 cover-redesign contest (for the Feb 2016 20th-anniversary edition): officially announced by Little, Brown but wrapped in pages of self-negating legalese (rules pulled from davidfosterwallacebooks.com, still mirrored at ij20.tumblr.com); sole judge is the DFW Literary Estate, i.e. two people: a lawyer (rendered "Alex Coner" in ASR) and Karen Green. Baldauf's entry: a US flag rotated so the bars run vertical — window bars, the cage. Bucher praises this because the cage (something you build in your own brain) is to him one of the book's central themes. A circulating VHS- cartridge design is criticized for missing the smiley face that marks the Entertainment's master cartridges ("did you read the book?").
  • The Cage, literalized: among J.O. Incandenza's several films titled Cage is a reference to a real film — Sidney Peterson's The Cage (1947) — which Bucher's IJ book club pulled up on YouTube: surreal beyond its era (reverse motion, a protagonist literally wearing a cage on his head), with enough IJ resonance that Bucher is surprised no academic paper exists on it.
  • Hal's sensorium: Baldauf finds IJ uniquely multi-sensory — Hal's experience reads to her like synesthesia or an Asperger's-type sensory flood ("a person walking through a room" rendered as imminent explosion) — and the writing's intensity physically affects her enough that she must ration when in the day she reads it. The hosts connect this to a listener question about Wallace and autism: Matt Tresco's essay on Wallace and autism in Consider David Foster Wallace, Ralph Clare's conference work on Mario and autism, and the high-functioning autistic character in "Little Expressionless Animals." Mario is read as the on-spectrum analogue of the ecstatic-perception passage; whether Wallace researched autism or was describing himself is left open.
  • Composition-history nugget: Baldauf reads the ecstatic-light passage from "All That" (New Yorker, 2009); Bucher's claim is that the story originated as Pale King material, and that when he asked Michael Pietsch about it at an Austin event, Pietsch answered to the effect of "you're probably right, but I couldn't figure out which child that adult character was linked to" — implying Pietsch could and did link the other childhood sections to specific adult IRS characters when assembling TPK, and cut "All That" because it wouldn't slot. Laird adds the passage sounds like Mario.
  • Karen Green material: her Pale King cover wove in fragments of Wallace's actual tax returns; the Ransom Center printed thousands of playing-card promo cards for the 2011 TPK launch (Bucher still gives them out as bookmarks). Her grief memoir Bough Down (ASR "Bow Down") never names Wallace — bleak, not hopeful, but craft-level prose both hosts rate highly (compared to Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking).
  • Baldauf's adjacent practice: the Optimism Filter project (large colored transparent plastic sheets offered to strangers as "a new view of a familiar place" and a social buffer) — she sees each IJ tab as an optimism filter at a different scale; 2016 plans include a stop-motion of the tabs filling the book, shot every 100 pages by photographer P.D. Rearick, and exploring publishing a mass-produced tabbed edition. She teaches the tabbed book to art students at Eastern Michigan University (newly tenure-track) as proof that reading can be an art form and a concentration aid.

Theories & evidence

THEORY: Hal's rendered experience is a synesthetic / autism-spectrum-like sensory flood

  • Crux: hal-sensorium
  • Stance: entertains
  • Evidence:
    • [inference] IJ reads to her as uniquely multi-sensory; Hal's passages resemble how a person with synesthesia or maybe Asperger's would describe experience — an ordinary event ("a person walking through a room", ASR approximate) rendered at imminent-explosion intensity. [00:42–00:44]
    • [inference] The writing's intensity affects her physically enough that she must ration what time of day she reads it — offered as corroborating the sensory-overload quality. [00:44]
  • Notes: Baldauf (guest); hosts receptive. She explicitly declines the biographical extension (did Wallace research autism or is this his own voice speaking? — "I don't get to know that", ASR approximate) [00:50]; the biography question stays out of scope per the lens.

THEORY: Mario Incandenza is an autism-spectrum character

  • Crux: mario-autism
  • Stance: entertains
  • Evidence:
    • [secondary] Matt Tresco's Wallace-and-autism essay in Consider David Foster Wallace; Ralph Clare's conference work on Wallace, Mario, and autism (raised answering a listener email). [00:45–00:46, 00:50]
    • [text] The high-functioning autistic character in "Little Expressionless Animals" as in-corpus precedent. [00:45]
    • [inference] The ecstatic-light passage from "All That" sounds like something Mario would say (Laird) — the unbearable-delight sensorium matched to Mario's awe at creation. [00:49]
  • Notes: Host-side reading, engaged sympathetically but not argued from IJ pages on-air; continuous with the hal-sensorium block above.

THEORY: The cage in IJ is self-built — something you put in your own brain

  • Crux: cage-self-built
  • Stance: advances
  • Evidence:
    • [text] J.O. Incandenza makes several films titled Cage; one entry references a real film, Sidney Peterson's The Cage (1947), whose protagonist literally wears a cage on his head — the metaphor made flat. [00:33]
    • [inference] His praise of Baldauf's contest cover (US flag rotated so the bars run vertical — window bars) as capturing what he calls one of the book's most important themes. [00:31–00:33]
  • Notes: Bucher. The Peterson identification itself is a factual catch (see Key claims); the interpretive claim is the self-imposed-cage reading.

THEORY: The physical book is Wallace's body — reading as intimate handling of him

  • Crux: book-as-body
  • Stance: rejects
  • Evidence:
    • [inference] (As reported:) a Q&A questioner at the 2015 conference framed carrying/leafing through IJ as holding and handling Wallace, with an intimate, near-sexual charge. [00:19–00:20]
  • Notes: Advanced only secondhand by the unnamed questioner; Bucher flatly rejects it ("I don't really buy it", ASR approximate); Laird counter-offers "his brain" — carrying part of Wallace's mind, the author you feel you know personally by the end.

THEORY: The endnote apparatus works like a tennis match — the reader volleyed to the back of the book and back

  • Crux: endnotes-structure
  • Stance: endorses
  • Evidence:
    • [inference] The physical back-and-forth of flipping mimics the volley — a reading Bucher says has circulated for ~15 years, and which he accepts over the body reading above. [00:19]
  • Notes: Name-checked as the older commonplace; no textual argument offered on-air. Counted as a popularity sighting.

Themes

Entertainment and the self (the cage as self-built; motif-hunting as its own compulsion loop); addiction and compulsion (the project sliding from focusing device to obsession to "escapism," her own framing); communication and solipsism (solitary reading becoming community; literature-makes-you-feel-less-alone debated and half-affirmed via its irony); the body and sensory experience (Hal's synesthetic intensity, Mario, the book's physicality).

Cross-references

Advances