IJ study archive

The Great Concavity Ep. 13: Rob Short — AA's Big Book, William James, and Wallace as recovering theory addict (April 2016)

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TL;DR

Spring 2016, mid-Infinite-Winter (Short and Bucher were co-writing AA/IJ posts at simpleranger.net). Short's dissertation casts Wallace as a "recovering theory addict" — Broom / the inter-novel essays / IJ mapped onto AA's what-we-were-like / what-happened / what-we're-like-now arc — and the episode is the archive's most sustained close reading of the actual Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous against IJ: the William James citation inside AA's own appendix, meaning-as-use converging with AA's "be of use," and a compositional argument for why IJ withholds Hal's and Gately's epiphanies. ASR transcript: paraphrase only.

Key claims

  • The Big Book cites William James by name. Short reads from Appendix II ("Spiritual Experience"), p. 567 of the Big Book (AA keeps pagination constant across editions): most members' transformations are — in the Big Book's own William James borrowing — of the slow educational type, developing over time (as aired). So Bill W.'s framework is already Jamesian — which closes the loop on IJ's own citation of The Varieties of Religious Experience in the Randy Lenz passage.
  • Lenz's hollowed-out Varieties was a medical textbook in draft. Short: in the original drafts, Lenz's cocaine stash was hidden in a medical textbook; Wallace switched it to the (nonexistent) large-print edition of James's Varieties — i.e., the book's most pointed philosophical citation was a deliberate late substitution, not furniture.
  • If IJ has one governing theorist, it's William James (Short): pragmatism as the filter everything else passes through; Bucher counters that the presiding spirit of the Ennet House third is Bill W. — Short's synthesis being that Bill W. is James downstream. The "We Agnostics" chapter is read on-air as deliberately Jamesian/pragmatist rhetoric: identify with the skeptic, concede logic its due, then argue the agnostic was already living by faith in reason ("look where that got us").
  • The mention/use distinction as Wallace's theory-ethics. From the Markson essay "The Empty Plenum" (which footnotes the distinction, crediting Frege — a name that also surfaces in IJ): Broom's "meaning is use" hammering was a mention of Wittgenstein; mature Wallace only admits a theory if the narrative uses it — dramatizing what living in a world governed by it would be like. Cross-lit with the McCaffery interview's test for metafictional techniques.
  • Meaning-as-use meets AA's "be of use." Short's signature claim: the Big Book buries the point that sobriety is only a means — the end is usefulness to others. For a writer who'd spent years on later Wittgenstein's socially-determined meaning-as-use, AA telling him "what we want from you is to be of use" must have rung loudly; the coffee-urns and folding-chairs passages in IJ (and Gately's hitting-the-knees routine) are the novel's liturgy of rote, unsexy use. Short goes further, admittedly beyond what he can footnote: writing IJ was Wallace working the steps.
  • Why IJ withholds the epiphanies (a poetics of the lacuna). In "The Empty Plenum" Wallace's one complaint about Wittgenstein's Mistress is Markson's pat backstory explanation for Kate — if the offered reason doesn't ring true, the character fails. Short argues this is exactly why IJ refuses to show Hal's or Gately's conversion moments — the William-James/AA-testimonial "seeing the light" — leaving the reader faced with the evidence that it worked (Gately stays clean) and required to fill in the cause: absence as universalizer. He reads Wallace's critical prose generally as a punch list — praise = do this; complaint = never again.
  • Wallace's advice to Markson, refused: Reader's Block's list of suicides — which includes ("In Condenza's in that, right?" — ASR; i.e. James Incandenza appears in Markson's suicide list) — was material Wallace advised Markson to cut; Markson politely kept it, "like Wallace would with Pietsch."
  • The Speak magazine interview, recovered: Short tracked down the defunct mid-90s Speak interview via former editor Dan Rolleri (copy retrieved from his mother's basement in California); in it Wallace says roughly that Broom traded emotional force away for technique, and that he would now trade technique to rescue the emotion (ASR, approximate) — the cleanest authorial statement of the between-novels conversion Short's dissertation narrates.
  • "Everybody worships," contested. Bucher's standing objection to This Is Water: saying everyone worships (so there's no atheism, so everyone has a higher power) conflates two things. Short's defense: it's a Nietzschean aphorism for a 20-minute speech; what Wallace means is whatever your attention drifts to in neutral gear — worship as default-mode attention, not creed. Laird ties it to Marathe's choose-your-temple speech (episode 3 callback). Zadie Smith's post-2008 "ultimate value" formulation (she doesn't want the ironist replaced by "a God botherer") is debated: Bucher thinks she should have stopped at "the word God need not be present" (ASR rendering of Smith's wording, approximate).
  • Mario as the Christological pole. Laird previews his MA-thesis argument (and his upcoming Wallace Conference paper): St. Paul/soteriology as a philosophical influence on IJ, with a spectrum of salvation — bleakness at one end, Gately's signs of hope in the middle, and Mario as near-Christological: the Barry Loach hand-touch as the scene that made him put the book down; Mario as "the anti-Orin" with Hal in between; though guileless, Caliban-esque Mario is "a big ask" as a reader-identification ideal.
  • Wallace as the Barry Loach figure: Bucher cites an interview with the real-life director of Granada House (rendered on-air as "the real Pat Montesian") on Wallace's exceptional kindness to addicts — driving throwaway people to meetings and appointments — and reads Barry Loach's Christ-like gesture as Wallace's self-portrait of that period; all three Incandenza brothers as facets of Wallace, including the self-disgust.
  • Glenn K.'s higher power is Satan — the trio dig up the Ennet House resident who picks Satan (Glenn K.), with Bucher floating the name as a nod to film critic Glenn Kenny (who commissioned Wallace for Premiere and appears as "Harold Hecuba" in Big Red Son lore); Lenz convincing Clenette (?) that his crotch could be her higher power cited as the snake-oil inversion of the same doctrine.
  • Teaching Wallace at UF (Short): first-ever all-Wallace course there — Brief Interviews, Consider the Lobster, all of The Pale King, plus Boswell's Understanding and Burn's Conversations; capped at 18, the discussion overran every 50-minute slot into a Google group that outlived the term (he half-jokes it cost him a dissertation year); the last brief interview was the first time he ever heard the phrase "trigger warning," with students emailing the night before that the material had messed them up; a student audited unofficially all term after his advisor said the slot was already filled. Students' proposed subtitle: "a thousand different kinds of sad."
  • Concordance datum: Short loaded IJ into a concordance app — "joy" appears ~12 times, "sad" ~94 (ASR numbers, approximate).
  • wallace-l prehistory, primary-sourced: for his dissertation's afterword (20+ pages on the Wallace-l community), Short used the Pynchon-l archives' search to find the actual post telling Wallace enthusiasts "why don't you make your own list" (ASR rendering of the post's wording) — the documentary origin of wallace-l.
  • Smaller: Kathleen Fitzpatrick taught Wallace's work down the hall from Wallace at Pomona, by mutual unspoken agreement never asking him in (via her blog Planned Obsolescence); Wallace's audience-regard flipped ~1989-90 (the letter to Franzen in the Max bio: no regard for the reader — later renounced); the La Conversazione clip where Wallace situates himself among writers using the postmodern/theoretical inheritance to get at "basic human verities."

Theories & evidence

**

THEORY: William James is IJ's governing theorist — pragmatism the filter everything passes through, with AA's Bill W. as James downstream

  • Crux: james-governing-theorist
  • Stance: advances
  • Evidence:
    • [text] IJ cites very few proper names, and among them is James's Varieties of Religious Experience — the Randy Lenz cocaine-stash passage. [00:43–00:44]
    • [draft] In the early drafts the stash hid inside a medical textbook; Wallace switched it to the nonexistent large-print Varieties — a deliberate late substitution, not furniture. [00:44]
    • [secondary] Big Book Appendix II ("Spiritual Experience," p. 567, pagination constant across editions) cites "the psychologist William James" by name — most members' transformations being of the slow educational type (James's term as relayed on air) — so Bill W.'s framework is already Jamesian. [00:44–00:45]
    • [inference] The "We Agnostics" chapter read as deliberately Jamesian/pragmatist rhetoric: identify with the skeptic, concede logic its due, then argue the agnostic was already living by faith in reason — capped, as aired, with the jab that such faith is exactly what got humanity to its present state. [00:46–00:49]
  • Notes: Bucher's counter recorded live: the presiding spirit of the Ennet House third is Bill W.; Short's synthesis is that Bill W. is James downstream, so the counter collapses into the theory.

THEORY: IJ deliberately withholds Hal's and Gately's epiphanies — the lacuna universalizes, per Wallace's own complaint about Markson's Kate

  • Crux: designed-holes
  • Stance: advances
  • Evidence:
    • [author] In "The Empty Plenum" Wallace's one complaint about Wittgenstein's Mistress is Markson's pat backstory explanation for Kate: if the offered reason doesn't ring true, the character fails for the reader. [00:34–00:35]
    • [inference] Short's punch-list reading of Wallace's critical prose — what he praises he does, what he complains about he never does again — turns that complaint into a compositional rule for IJ. [00:33–00:34]
    • [text] IJ accordingly never shows the Jamesian/AA-testimonial "seeing the light" moments for Hal or Gately; the reader is faced with the evidence that it worked (Gately staying clean) and must fill in a sufficient cause — absence as universalizer. [00:35–00:36]
  • Notes: Bucher complicates supportively: Markson later took the advice, ditching the Kate-like character after Reader's Block — i.e. the rule was real advice, not only self-directed. [00:36–00:37] No position taken anywhere in the episode on the ending's plot mechanics (no DMZ/wraith/YDAU talk). Reuses the designed-holes crux from Carlisle (ep. 40): independent argument, same conclusion — record as separate sightings.

THEORY: Writing IJ was Wallace working the steps

  • Crux: ij-as-step-work
  • Stance: advances
  • Evidence:
    • [inference] Offered with Short's own caveat that, pressed, he could not produce a one-two-three evidence list — a gut synthesis. [01:08]
    • [author] Wallace's years inside later Wittgenstein's meaning-as-use meeting AA's buried doctrine that sobriety is only a means and the end is being of use — Short can see "his ears pricking up" (ASR, approximate) at that page; the mention/use distinction is footnoted (crediting Frege) in "The Empty Plenum." [01:09–01:11]
    • [text] The coffee-urns and folding-chairs passages and Gately's hitting-the-knees routine as the novel's liturgy of rote, unsexy usefulness. [01:11–01:13]
    • [secondary] Bucher (supporting): the interview with Granada House's real-life director on Wallace's exceptional kindness — driving throwaway people to meetings and appointments — with Barry Loach's Christ-like gesture as Wallace's self-portrait of that period, and all three Incandenza brothers as facets of Wallace. [01:07–01:08]
  • Notes: Biographical-compositional rather than plot-scoped, but advanced on-air as an interpretive claim and recorded as stated; admittedly beyond footnoting by its own author.

THEORY: AA's rote, unsexy routine is the one way forward IJ actually shows working

  • Crux: salvation-spectrum
  • Stance: advances
  • Evidence:
    • [text] Gately is saved by unthinking routine — do what you're told; in print's words he "hits the knees in the A.M. and asks for Help and then hits the knees again at bedtime and says Thank You, whether he believes he’s talking to Anything/-body or not" (p. 443) — not by dwelling on the higher-power question. [00:50–00:51, 01:12–01:13]
    • [author] Wallace on record that diagnosis does not lead to cure — fiction must find and revive, CPR-fashion, whatever in us stays human (ASR recall of the published RCF formulation) — so the book must offer a way forward somewhere. [01:12–01:13]
    • [inference] The one thing shown to work, paradoxically and almost inexplicably, for the characters (and, Short thinks, for Wallace) is AA itself: myriad petty, unsexy daily sacrifice, ugly and hard, no happily-ever-after. [01:13–01:14]
  • Notes: Short's closing synthesis, built as a direct answer to Bucher's "where's the way out?" challenge.

THEORY: "Everybody worships" means default-mode attention, not literal no-atheism

  • Crux: worship-attention
  • Stance: advances
  • Evidence:
    • [inference] Short: the line is a Nietzschean aphorism compressed for a 20-minute speech; what Wallace means is whatever your mind drifts to in neutral gear — worship as default attention, continuous with his career-long attention preoccupation. [00:53–00:55]
    • [text] Marathe's choose-your-altars/temple speech as the in-novel anchor for the same idea (Laird, connecting back to episode 3). [00:55–00:56]
    • [secondary] Zadie Smith's post-2008 "ultimate value" formulation debated as the same move — Bucher holding she should have stopped at her concession that "God" as a word is dispensable (as aired). [00:52–00:53]
  • Notes: Bucher's standing objection recorded live: everybody-worships conflates two things (no-atheism doesn't follow), and he remains unpersuaded on-air. A This Is Water crux admitted here for its Marathe anchor in IJ.

THEORY: IJ presents a spectrum of salvation with Mario as its near-Christological pole (St. Paul/soteriology as a philosophical influence)

  • Crux: salvation-spectrum
  • Stance: advances
  • Evidence:
    • [inference] Laird's thesis frame: soteriology/conversion narrative as a philosophical influence on IJ; a spectrum from bleakness at one end through Gately's signs of hope to a near-Christological model in Mario. [01:03, 01:05–01:06]
    • [text] The Barry Loach hand-touch as the scene that made him put the book down; Mario's conversations with Hal; Mario as the anti-Orin with Hal in between. [01:06–01:07]
  • Notes: The host's (Laird's) MA-thesis and upcoming Wallace Conference argument, not the guest's; he concedes guileless, Caliban-esque (clawed) Mario is a big ask (his phrase, as aired) as a reader-identification ideal. [01:07]

Themes

addiction-and-recovery (the Big Book read as rhetoric and doctrine; rote discipline, use, the coffee urns; AA as the one thing shown to work); irony-and-sincerity (theory as addiction; mention vs. use; the Speak conversion statement); communication-and-solipsism (writing-for-audience arc; jargon vs. communication, staged in the hosts' own academic-conference war stories); entertainment-and-the-self (worship as default attention); religion/salvation (post-secular Wallace, Mario as Christological, the spectrum of salvation, Zadie Smith's ultimate value); the ending (the withheld-epiphany poetics, obliquely).

Cross-references

  • [[community source]-big-book-challenge-ij-intro](/source/[community source]-big-book-challenge-ij-intro) — the other Big-Book-against-IJ source; this episode adds the James citation and the We Agnostics rhetoric reading.
  • themes/addiction-and-recovery — the use/rote-discipline material belongs here.
  • mccaffery-1993-interview — the theory-must-function test Short builds on; also the 49/51 pleasure-pain ratio invoked re: teaching.
  • this-is-water — the everybody-worships dispute is a direct gloss; record Bucher's objection and Short's attention-based defense side by side.
  • dtmax-every-love-story / harvard-dtmax-wood-dfw — the Arizona Derrida-fight anecdote and theory-as-gravitas reading Short takes from Max; also the Granada House director material (the archive identifies her as Deb Larson) behind the "real Pat Montesian" interview cited here.
  • bucher-fantods-wallace-l-fandom / gc-ep010-nick-maniatis-howling-fantods — the wallace-l origin story; Short's Pynchon-l-archive find is the primary-source anchor for what those tell as lore.
  • infinite-summer-fitzpatrick-teaching-ij — the Pomona down-the-hall arrangement retold here.
  • video-italy-2006 — the La Conversazione clip Short paraphrases.
  • moore-first-draft-ij — draft-change shelf for the Lenz medical-textbook → Varieties substitution.
  • Characters/scenes: Randy Lenz (the Varieties stash; the crotch-as-higher-power con); Glenn K. (Satanism as higher power); Don Gately (knees, coffee, routine; the withheld bottom); Hal (withheld epiphany; between Mario and Orin); Mario and Barry Loach (the touch); Marathe (choose-your-temple); the rabidly-Christian updraft woman in the AA speaker story.

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