IJ study archive

The Great Concavity Ep. 21: Clare Hayes-Brady — The Unspeakable Failures of David Foster Wallace, resistance to closure, and Wallace on gender (recorded ~November 2016)

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TL;DR

The author of The Unspeakable Failures of David Foster Wallace (Bloomsbury, Feb 2016) interviewed months after publication — the archive's primary-voice statement of the resistance-to-closure argument that Carlisle later imports into Nature's Nightmare (see ep. 40). Core positions delivered viva voce: Wallace's corpus is coherent around non-completion, endings figure as death, and IJ, in her formula, is a novel whose ending precedes its beginning; Wallace's narcissism is infantile (a drive to communicate) and distinct from solipsism; the silenced feminine in his fiction has a power of its own, and the silence marks an unwillingness to appropriate voices; the nonfiction persona is charmingly disingenuous. Datable to ~Nov 2016 (book out February, daughter born ~April, Shriver and Hungerford controversies current, Ferrante unmasking fresh). ASR, paraphrase only; the transcript carries a single [00:00:00] stamp, so locators below are coarse transcript positions ([early]/[mid]/[late]), not timestamps.

Key claims

  • Book genesis: her PhD (Trinity College Dublin, supervised by the same Philip who supervised Tim — the Dublin Wallace enclave with Adam [Kelly, by then gone to York] and Tom/Tracy) began exactly two weeks after Wallace died (Sept 2008); the field then mushroomed so fast that the 2016 book bears little relation to the thesis — only the basic-philosophy chapter (ch. 4) survived more or less unchanged. She credits the 2009 Liverpool "Consider David Foster Wallace" conference (which Bucher was involved in) as the field-forming event. [early]
  • The title is admitted clickbait: the original title was Necessary Failure; failure there is meant in a near-Beckettian sense (generative, fail-again-fail-better), not as verdict — though she does hold that parts of Wallace's work simply fail. [early, late]
  • Contrarian positioning, on the record: she rates herself, as-aired, likely the lone real Wallace scholar without total love for Infinite Jest — it's so clearly a masterpiece and career-center that she's more interested in the periphery; she sends newcomers to the short fiction, not IJ; she read Broom first and keeps a soft spot for it (Norman Bombardini, the names); she tore her IJ paperback in half to carry it (it didn't fit in her handbag). Her theory that whichever Wallace book comes first for a reader stays the one they keep returning to; D.T. Max reportedly says the same. [early, mid]
  • Textual errors discussed (cite-as-written material): the "Byzantine erotica" of IJ is probably the wrong era — the racy stuff is Pompeii (Bucher); Wallace also misspells "Québécois" persistently — per the hosts there are two accepted spellings and he uses neither. Whether these are errors or intentional errors is left open (see Theories). [early]
  • On Franzen's posthumous claim that Wallace's inability to write love proved his depression: hosts find it distasteful; she notes Wallace wrote almost no successful relationships anywhere (even background ones) despite being obsessed with love in every register — but happiness is bad art as a general rule, and Franzen (a Bad Sex Award nominee, per the hosts) is no arbiter. [mid]
  • Brief Interviews and misogyny: she finds B.I. astonishing but hard to read as a woman; cites a Bookworm interview where Wallace describes the misogyny he's writing as coming from fear of women; declines to diagnose Wallace himself (she never knew the man, she notes). [mid]
  • The Harris anecdote (Bucher, from a Wallace conference): Charles Harris told of Wallace failing a student for using the c-word in a story — yet B.I. #20 ends on that word, assigned to the hideous narrator, followed by the literal closing words "End of story." (the published B.I. #20 ending, verified against the held text) — the most literal bad ending imaginable. She adds the word is the only term for female genitalia not originally pejorative, hence its power, and speculates about reclamation; notes Irish profanity norms differ. [mid]
  • Lenore Beadsman is a poorly-disguised Wallace avatar (her book's phrasing as read on-air by Bucher, rendering unverified against the printed book; she agrees) — which may be why Lenore doesn't read as particularly feminine; a female character not about her gender, going right back to the start of the career. [mid]
  • "Solomon Silverfish" and the too-pretty character's Black vernacular: obvious and clunky to the point of tears, she says — but at least he tried; the double bind (write the other and be told you can't; don't and you didn't try) faces all writers, and Wallace was unusually open about his discomfort with it. [mid]
  • Hungerford and Shriver, both engaged and both half-rejected: Hungerford (the do-not-read-Wallace piece) is not wholly wrong, she allows, but misses the point twice over — she reads Wallace simplistically and presupposes we should only read perfect art; Shriver (the cultural-appropriation keynote) likewise not right, not totally wrong. Her Hurston teaching example (Their Eyes Were Watching God's mule chapter as symbolic language whose keys the reader is deliberately denied — the author owing the reader no such key, on her gloss) as the other side of the appropriation question. [mid]
  • On authenticity-market drift: Ferrante/Knausgaard-style autofictional first-person as a return to the novel's origins (found documents, editor's-note framings — Manzoni's The Betrothed cited); she had no curiosity about Ferrante's identity since the books already are who she is; the Steph Penney Tenderness of Wolves and Bellow Henderson the Rain King never-went-there cases; art is always political because it is, not because it should be. [mid–late]
  • Everything and More: a disaster she finds fascinating — he conflates two paradoxes, turns out no great hand at the maths, and tries to write simultaneously to innumerate and expert readers (the if-you're-interested sections inviting experts to skip half the text) — two incompatible books in one. She loves the voice anyway. [late]
  • Her readerly bottom line: what keeps bringing her back is the heart — an extraordinary love for the world, language, and people in all their confusion; she reads Wallace (and Beckett) hopefully; her conclusion's last line, quoted by Bucher: Wallace's resistance to ending helps us locate a beginning. [late]
  • Current work (2016 snapshot): on maternity leave; Ponder Review(?) blog post on ethnicity/gender politics in IJ (ASR garbles the venue); an essay on motherhood-as-journey-into-language (Honest Ulsterman); a George Saunders language-and-politics essay forthcoming (much Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil); a Jodi Picoult piece on the women's-writing dichotomy; an Orbit piece for the Wallace special issue; a side book of essays on burlesque in Ireland (Intellect). Bloomsbury (Laura Ewen) as the emerging Wallace-canon publisher: Lucas Thompson's book and the Stephen Burn-edited DFW series imminent. [late]
  • Wallace readership gender datum: she thinks the majority of Wallace's readers are probably male but the landscape is changing; her most astute students on Wallace are often women; the misogynist reputation plus sheer physical size make IJ a forbidding entry for women readers; Joyce studies is still more of a boys' club. [mid]

Theories & evidence

THEORY: Wallace's whole corpus is organized by resistance to closure — endings figure as death/failure, and IJ is deliberately built so its ending precedes its beginning

  • Crux: designed-holes
  • Stance: advances
  • Evidence:
    • [inference] Her organizing discovery: she could find no endings in Wallace's work, beginning to end of the career — non-completion as the coherent thread, sharpened by short-story theory (where beginning-middle-end never applied). [early]
    • [text] "The Planet Trillaphon..." — among his first stories — ends mid-sentence; Broom of the System ends mid-sentence with the omitted word being "word." [early]
    • [text] Oblivion as the mature case: "Good Old Neon" refuses to let even death be the end; "Another Pioneer"(?) / the not-another-word ending; suicide and death haunting Brief Interviews — endings and death knotted tightly to one another. [early]
    • [secondary] Rorty (whose whole project was keeping the conversation going) and Ricoeur (narrative as ordering inchoate experience) as the philosophical spine: Wallace takes Ricoeur's point and objects that an ordered narrative no longer reflects reality — hence a book whose ending precedes its beginning — not-finishing in definitional form. [early]
    • [author] Wallace's own realism defense of IJ's fractured structure — the hosts echo his published Salon remark, "It's just the texture of the world I live in." (Miller 1996 — verified byte-true against [local source]) — plus his admission that he was bad at writing endings (host-supplied). [early]
    • [secondary] Beckett's fail-again-fail-better as the model for failure-as-generative; her original title Necessary Failure. [late]
  • Notes: Bucher pushes back on the early evidence: Trillaphon/Broom's mid-sentence stops read as a 24-year-old at peak postmodernism straining for cleverness, philosophy recruited after the fact — the omitted "word" striking him as a touch too cute. She partly concedes (philosophy propping up what may at bottom have been a trick, in her as-aired formulation) while holding that the closure trouble is real and career-long. She explicitly disavows the neoliberal failure-as-path-to-success reading. This is the primary-voice statement of the argument Carlisle cites (via the unbridgeable-gap / keep-the-conversation-going idea) in gc-ep040; the exact phrase "unbridgeable gap" is not used on-air — the formulation here is gap-bridging between the self and everyone else as the heart of the work. [late]

THEORY: IJ is built to send the reader back to its beginning — the drive back is pleasure in the text itself

  • Crux: annular-structure
  • Stance: advances
  • Evidence:
    • [inference] Bucher: Wallace works at steering his reader back around to the book's opening, an authorial statement that what drives you back is textual pleasure; the kind of book you can finish, turn over, and start again. [early]
  • Notes: Bucher advances; Hayes-Brady engages sympathetically (her ends-before-it-begins formulation is the same architecture read as anti-closure rather than as loop-reward). Bucher's framing of the ending as hostile to the reader and profoundly sad for many, with the wraith name-checked in passing, carries no mechanism claims.

THEORY: Wallace's narcissism is infantile narcissism — an urgent drive to get outside the self — and is categorically distinct from solipsism

  • Crux: infantile-narcissism
  • Stance: advances
  • Evidence:
    • [secondary] Mary Holland's essay identifying the narcissism in Wallace as infantile narcissism. [mid]
    • [inference] The infant analogy (she'd recently had a daughter): an infant can't see beyond its own boundaries yet its primary drive, without speech or awareness, is to communicate beyond itself — an almost incoherent need to communicate, empathic and asking for empathy, not selfish. [mid]
    • [inference] The definitional split: a solipsist has no reason to communicate (nothing exists outside the self), whereas infantile narcissism exists to get outside itself — a distinction she says we fail to articulate when we use the terms interchangeably. [mid]
    • [author] The McCaffery interview's simultaneous giving-and-taking at publication (ASR renders "mcafree"). [mid]
    • [secondary] Adam Kelly on the transactional gift and new sincerity. [mid]
  • Notes: Framed against the then-current "toxic narcissism" buzzword; writing a book that size is narcissistic, but as offering rather than demand.

THEORY: The silenced feminine carries its own power in Wallace — female characters' silencing as refusal to appropriate a voice, his masculinity occupying rather than conversing (her as-aired formulation)

  • Crux: silenced-feminine
  • Stance: advances
  • Evidence:
    • [text] B.I. #20: the granola cruncher is never named (an epithet instead of an identity), her story is appropriated and retold as the narrator's own — yet her language takes the story over all the way through, and he devolves into a ranting maniac precisely because he cannot take ownership of it. [mid]
    • [text] The story's doubled misogyny (the rapist-murderer; the narrator's belittling retelling) ending in an openly hostile misogynistic rant at the interviewer — with the enormously problematic implication that empathizing with a rapist could rob the rape of its rapist's power. [mid]
    • [secondary] The Philomela myth (tongue cut out to prevent telling; the tapestry; the nightingale — Ovid's Metamorphoses, which Wallace was surely familiar with, and which Barth used heavily in Lost in the Funhouse): a long history of representing female experience through alternative forms of language. [mid]
    • [inference] Female characters' narratives persistently "come through anyway," despite male protagonists' efforts to quash them — different kinds of power at play; hence the silencing reads as Wallace refusing to do what the B.I. #20 narrator does. [mid]
  • Notes: Her stated caution, as-aired in indirect form: accusing Wallace of misogyny is not necessarily wrong, just likely less than simple. Host contribution folded in: Bucher's reading of B.I. #20 as a metaphor for writing itself — the pressure to connect with readers as survival — which she takes up (surviving, not merely staying alive). Related host thesis she endorses: the most feminist thing a male writer can do may be writing a female character not about femininity (Lenore, Madame Psychosis, Toni Ware cited as complicating any grand gender thesis).

THEORY: The misogyny Wallace writes comes from fear of women, not triumph — investigation, not endorsement

  • Crux: wallace-misogyny
  • Stance: advances
  • Evidence:
    • [author] A Bookworm interview where Wallace says the misogyny he's writing comes from a place of real fear — men who are afraid of women. [mid]
    • [text] The title itself is the clue, the host observes — hideous men; nothing triumphant in the portrayals. [mid]
    • [inference] The near-total absence of successful relationships in a writer obsessed with love (romantic, platonic, social) marks the relationships as investigation-sites, not models — love in Wallace manifests outside relationships. [mid]
  • Notes: She explicitly brackets the biographical question (whether Wallace himself was misogynistic — again, she never knew him); Franzen's depression-diagnosis-via-love-writing is the rejected rival reading.

THEORY: Wallace's nonfiction persona is disingenuous — he abrogates expertise he actually possesses, as a shortcut to empathy with the reader

  • Crux: nonfiction-persona
  • Stance: advances
  • Evidence:
    • [text] "Greatly Exaggerated": he claims only hardcore theory-weenies (as-aired) could care, aligning himself with the common reader — while being exactly such a weenie writing at that level about post-structuralism, repeatedly disclaiming knowledge he plainly has. [late]
    • [text] "Consider the Lobster": calling the Gourmet staff the magazine-people, kind of disingenuous — while being exactly that himself. [late]
    • [text] Everything and More as the failure mode of the same voice: conflating two paradoxes, weak maths, addressing incompatible audiences at once. [late]
    • [inference] The us-and-them alignment establishes a spurious reader-relationship — empathy taken by shortcut, as-aired — once noticed, impossible to unnotice. [late]
  • Notes: Delivered with affection — she finds the voice endlessly charming and loves the nonfiction; the charge is disingenuousness of stance, not of feeling.

THEORY: IJ's factual errors (Byzantine erotica, the Québécois misspelling) may be intentional errors

  • Crux: intentional-errors
  • Stance: entertains
  • Evidence:
    • [text] The erotica Hal/the text calls Byzantine is chronologically wrong — the racy mosaics are Pompeii (Bucher); errors of the kind abound in the book, he adds. [early]
    • [text] Wallace persistently spells Québécois in a way matching neither accepted spelling. [early]
  • Notes: Genuinely undecided on-air (telling error from intentional error stays hard, they agree); both speakers disclaim expertise on the French. Recorded for the theory record because the error-vs-plant question recurs across sources; no resolution offered.

Themes

The ending / closure (resistance to closure as the master key; endings as death); structure and design (ends-before-it-begins; the loop back to chapter one); communication-and-solipsism (infantile narcissism vs. solipsism; bridging the gap as the work's heart); irony-and-sincerity (new sincerity, the transactional gift, the disingenuous nonfiction persona); gender and the other (silenced feminine, appropriation double bind, Wardine-adjacent vernacular problem via "Solomon Silverfish"); failure (necessary, Beckettian, generative).

Cross-references

Advances