The Great Concavity Ep. 12: David Hering — Fiction and Form, the Ransom Center drafts of IJ, and the Liverpool reading group (recorded 1 April 2016)

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TL;DR

Recorded 1 April 2016 (mid-Infinite-Winter), five months before Hering's David Foster Wallace: Fiction and Form (Bloomsbury, Sept 2016) shipped. Hering is one of the few scholars to have worked through the IJ drafts at the Harry Ransom Center, and the episode's spine is firsthand manuscript testimony: which parts of IJ came late (Year of Glad, most Orin material), which came startlingly early (the professional-conversationalist scene), what was cut and why, and — most consequentially for the ending debate — his flat statement that the "missing year" material people go to the archive hoping to find was never written. Plus questions from his Liverpool IJ reading group and a preview of the book's ghost/Midwest/Pale-King chapters. ASR transcript: paraphrase only.

Key claims

The missing-year material does not exist in the drafts. Hering says the question everyone takes to the Ransom Center — is there draft material on what happens before Year of Glad? do we see Gately and Hal together? — comes up empty: in everything he has seen, that material isn't there, and he's not aware it ever existed. Wallace was "clearly always working on it with the understanding" that certain material would be absent and inferred by the reader, with multiple decodings deliberately left open (ASR, approximate in phrasing; the claim itself is repeated and unambiguous).
The Year of Glad opening is a late addition; for a long time the novel opened with the professional-conversationalist scene (published IJ pp. 27-32), which Hering thinks may be the earliest-written piece of the book: the original draft of it carries the date 1986, though he can't say whether that dates the writing or the scene's internal setting.
The original opening sequence: conversationalist scene segueing directly into the 1960 scene of young James Incandenza being taught tennis by his father — two father-son "conversations" back to back. The 1960 material was much longer in draft, including the father taking JOI to the shed and setting black widows on fire; the early-pages cuts were made at Michael Pietsch's request (Hering has seen the letters; the gist: too much, too complex, too misanthropic at the front door).
Orin calcified late. Hering's strongest compositional characterization: Orin was present early but got "polished" very late — his final scene in the novel appears nearly (not quite) at copy-edit stage; the cut material skews Orin-ward: his waking-up scene was ~6-7 pages longer in draft (more nightmare), and the Marlon Bain / Avril / Orin letter sequence was "seriously longer."
Cut Avril-affair scene: Bucher recalls, from (he believes) the draft Wallace sent Steven Moore in 1994, an early scene — second or third section of the book — of Avril in a car with a lover en route to an airport hotel; on-air this resolves a five-year puzzle for Hering, who connects it to an unusual pencil-written early draft at the Ransom Center of two lovers going to an airport. Bucher's further hypothesis: Wallace repurposed the scene's material for the story "Adult World."
Against the lays-it-all-out-then-subtracts model: Hering went to the archive assuming Wallace wrote everything in full and then absented information; the drafts disproved this — the gaps were constitutive, not carved.
S. Johnson the dog: hosts float B.S. Johnson as the namesake; the on-air consensus lands on Samuel Johnson (the dictionary, via Avril). Real yield: Hering is "90% certain" Wallace owned B.S. Johnson's Christie Malry's Own Double-Entry (cf. Stephen Burn's piece connecting it to The Pale King's tax/debit-credit world), i.e. Wallace plausibly read B.S. Johnson regardless.
Pale King composition history (the final chapter of Hering's book): he splits 1997-2007 into three compositional periods — (1) the novel as "Sir John Feelgood," about pornography, bracketed by Brief Interviews absorbing the sex/pornography ideas; (2) the novel as "Glitterer" up to ~2005, with an enormous amount of never-published material; (3) the Pale King proper. Much of the extra material is alternative versions rather than additional scenes — many completely different openings — which is why Pietsch couldn't kitchen-sink it; Hering's book prints/discusses the Sir John Feelgood and Glitterer openings.
Oblivion absorbed The Pale King: early versions of "The Soul Is Not a Smithy" have Drinion, and separately Nugent, in the classroom; "Incarnations of Burned Children" was originally Drinion's childhood story; "Mr. Squishy" was originally part of The Pale King, set in a world tangential to it.
His book's thesis: Wallace's fiction as a struggle pitting monologic against dialogic modes, read at the levels of subject, construction, and composition; the ghost chapter reads the escalating prevalence of ghosts across the fiction as dramatizing voice-possession anxiety (who is speaking, who speaks for whom), culminating in "Good Old Neon," whose narration layers he calls near-impossible to fully disentangle and which he rates as Wallace's ceiling. He credits Timothy Jacobs's unpublished dissertation work on ghosts ("The Eschatological Imagination"; the Karamazov/IJ portion was published separately). The regionalism chapter: Wallace as program/institutional writer; The Pale King as his only heartfelt (vs. performative, e.g. "Westward") Midwest, interested in how capital hollows out Midwestern towns into the circular shapes that obsess him.
Reading-group question (Scott): does the reading experience of IJ mirror rehabilitation — persevere and it gets easier? Laird: yes, with a specific turning point (~quarter mark) where cohesion becomes visible; Bucher: no — it keeps demanding effort and "you can relapse" 700 pages in, and abandonment deep into the book is itself the addict's pattern (he pairs the Big Book's "we are not a glum lot" with the reading-group question about whether joy exists in Wallace at all). Hering withholds draft knowledge from first-time readers to avoid overload.
Wallace-studies snapshot (spring 2016): Hayes-Brady out (Feb), Hering due Sept, Lucas Thompson (Wallace and world literature) due ~Dec, Jeff Severs (Columbia UP) due ~Oct — the from-one-page-bibliography-to-unfollowable explosion both hosts and guest marvel at; Adam Kelly's "Death of the Author and Birth of a Discipline" (2010) marks the before-times.
Color: Hering ran a 12-person all-levels (first-year-to-PhD) IJ reading group at Liverpool, ~100-150 pp/fortnight, loosely synced with Infinite Winter (he corresponded with Mark Flanagan); one student mapped the whole novel's structure on her wall, spider diagrams accreting weekly. Hering joined wallace-l pre-social-media for the same no-one-to-talk-to reason everyone did; the book he read after IJ was The Recognitions (not recommended).

Theories & evidence

THEORY: The "missing year" material was never written — the ending's absences are constitutive design, with multiple decodings deliberately left open

Crux: ending-missing-year
Stance: advances
Evidence:
- [draft] Firsthand: in all the Ransom Center IJ material he has seen, the material everyone goes to the archive hoping to find — what happens before Year of Glad, Gately and Hal together — "doesn't exist" (ASR, approximate), and he is not aware it ever did. [00:17]
- [draft] His own going-in assumption — that Wallace laid everything out in full and then absented information — was disproved by the drafts: the gaps were never filled in the first place, not carved out. [00:16–00:17]
- [inference] Therefore Wallace was clearly always working with the understanding that certain material would be absent and inferred by the reader, with "multiple opportunities to decide what was happening" (ASR, approximate) deliberately left open. [00:17]
Notes: Testimony first, theory second — the interpretive edge (absence as design; plural decodings intended) is Hering's inference from what isn't there. Independent of, and convergent with, Carlisle's designed-holes claim (ep. 40). The mild tension with Moore's post-Gately outline notes (scenes vs. sketches) is on the record.

THEORY: The escalating ghosts across Wallace's fiction dramatize voice-possession anxiety — who is speaking, and who speaks for whom

Crux: ghost-voice-possession
Stance: advances
Evidence:
- [inference] The prevalence of ghosts strengthens steadily across the fiction, moving from a failure to locate one's own voice toward literal possession by — or literal conversation with — a ghost inside the text. [00:56]
- [text] "Good Old Neon" as the culmination: narration layers so interwoven it is near-impossible to tell whom the talk addresses, or where (or in how many places at once) it takes place. [00:58–00:59]
- [secondary] Timothy Jacobs's unpublished dissertation work on ghosts ("The Eschatological Imagination"), cited heavily in his ghost chapter. [00:57]
Notes: Preview of his book's first chapter; the frame is his monologic-vs-dialogic thesis. He takes no position on the IJ wraith's reality — this is a reading of what the ghost device does, not a wraith-reality stance.

THEORY: The reading experience of IJ mirrors the novel's theme of rehabilitation — persevere and it relents; abandoning it is relapse

Crux: reading-as-rehab
Stance: entertains
Evidence:
- [inference] Laird (endorsing): the first quarter is obtuse and unforgiving, then a specific turning point (~quarter mark; page number withheld on-air for spoilers) makes cohesion visible and "an engine kicks in" (ASR, approximate). [00:11–00:13]
- [inference] Bucher (rejecting): it keeps demanding effort and "you can relapse" (ASR, approximate) 700 pages in — and abandonment deep into the book is itself the addict's pattern of not sticking with a clean program. [00:11, 00:13–00:14]
Notes: Question originated with Scott of Hering's Liverpool reading group; Hering relays it without committing, adding only that he withholds draft knowledge from first-time readers to avoid overload. The split host verdicts are the datum — recorded per speaker, no consensus reached.

THEORY: S. Johnson the dog is named for Samuel Johnson (via Avril), not B.S. Johnson

Crux: s-johnson-name
Stance: advances
Evidence:
- [inference] Hering: surely it has to be Samuel Johnson — the dictionary connection fits Avril the prescriptive grammarian. [00:06]
- [secondary] The B.S. Johnson alternative stays alive anyway: he is "90% certain" Wallace owned Christie Malry's Own Double-Entry (cf. Stephen Burn's piece connecting it to The Pale King's tax/debit-credit world), so Wallace plausibly read B.S. Johnson regardless. [00:06–00:07]
Notes: Hosts floated B.S. Johnson as the namesake; on-air consensus lands on Samuel Johnson. Minor naming crux, counted for completeness.

Themes

Composition and structure (the master theme here); the ending / designed absence; addiction-and-recovery (reading-as-rehab question; relapse-as-DNF); irony-sincerity only glancingly (Wallace underrated as comic writer — the Leonard Stecyk sequences as hysterically funny); family-hamlet (the cut Avril-affair scene; the two father-son conversations as original opening); communication-and-solipsism (monologic vs. dialogic as his whole critical frame; ghosts as voice-possession).

Cross-references

moore-first-draft-ij — the essential pairing: Moore's 1993-draft collation independently confirms the conversationalist opening, the late Year of Glad, the cut Avril-lover scene, and the cut black-widow material; Hering extends it with post-1993 Ransom Center strata (Orin's near-copy-edit finalization) and the 1986-dated conversationalist draft.
debraski-ij-cuts — the public windows on the same cut material (incl. the Newsweek scans of the black-widow scene); Hering here is the rare voice who has seen the rest.
infinite-summer-pietsch-editing-ij and dtmax-2009-the-unfinished — Pietsch's side of the cuts correspondence Hering has read.
themes/the-ending — the no-missing-year-drafts testimony bears directly on the reconstruction-vs-projection fault line.
gc-ep010-nick-maniatis-howling-fantods — same-season episode; its publishing-snapshot bullets corroborate the 2016 monograph wave named here.
infinite-summer-fitzpatrick-teaching-ij and leaf-by-leaf-gettysburg-2023 — other classroom/group-read accounts; Hering's all-levels voluntary group is a distinct model.
Characters/scenes: the professional conversationalist (pp. 27-32); Year of Glad opening; young JOI and his father (1960); Orin (waking scene; the Bain/Avril letters; his final scene); Avril; S. Johnson; Poor Tony's seizure and the Drano dosing of C (cited by Hering as the catalogue-of-horrors stretch his group was in).