IJ study archive

The Great Concavity Ep. 26: Jeff Severs — Balancing Books, axiology, and Wallace's fictions of value (recorded Oscar night, Feb 26 2017)

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TL;DR

Book-launch interview with Jeff Severs (Associate Professor of English, UBC; Michener Center MFA; also a Pynchon scholar — co-edited a 2011 Against the Day collection) on David Foster Wallace's Balancing Books: Fictions of Value (Columbia UP), the first single-author overview of the career after an era of edited collections. Datable precisely: "it's Oscar night tonight" (Moonlight vs. La La Land = Feb 26, 2017), post-"November 8th" election talk throughout. Core of the episode is Severs restating the book's thesis — Wallace's fiction is organized around axiology (value, balance, ground), demoting economic value beneath moral/metaphysical value — plus a run of archive-derived nuggets (Wallace's IJ-annotated copy of Lewis Hyde's The Gift, an unused penny-essay drafted as one of Hal's essays) and a preview of his then-unwritten 2017 ISU-conference keynote on Wallace and immanence (doors, exits, gates). Laird's MA thesis context: Severs was his external reviewer, so guest and host share an axiology vocabulary. ASR transcript: paraphrase only.

Key claims

  • The book's genesis: begun in earnest 2013; started not from finance but from balance — Wallace constantly writing about standing, feet on ground, and the yin-yang (a career-long symbol from Taoism) — then value in all senses, then axiology as the unifying term. [00:07–00:09]
  • Axiology sourced from Wallace himself: the term comes from Wallace's dictionary notes (partly reprinted in Both Flesh and Not), where it is defined — per the on-air reading — as the philosophy of value and of value-judgments. Severs quotes Heidegger in his introduction for axios = the worthy, what has weight. Wallace uses the axiomatic against his Wittgenstein/logical-positivism inheritance, which excluded value statements from fact statements. [00:11–00:13]
  • Tripartite Wallace: brilliant at philosophy and fiction, but with economics as a real third field at Amherst (Severs makes something of this pre-theses); Broom's Andrew "Wang-Dang" Lang as the Amherst economics major, Lenore's below-her-skills low-wage job, Norman Bombardini as Reaganite consumer capitalism gone berserk. [00:16–00:23]
  • Oedipal angle: fiction as a way of doing something other than his philosopher father (whom there's evidence Wallace read for and copy-edited); D.T. Max's datum of the childhood aspiration to be an Illinois congressman; worry over whether writing fiction even counted as a job feeding the late-career obsession with the most boring jobs possible (tax accounting). [00:15–00:19]
  • Biography, obliquely encoded: Wallace found "incredibly wacky, esoteric, oblique" ways of writing personal experience that the initial reception couldn't recognize — e.g. IJ's dedication to maternal grandfather F.P. Foster. Severs defends criticism that honors this stratum without the intentional fallacy. [00:26–00:31]
  • Class as untapped IJ topic: the guy-from-Illinois vs. New-York-scene two-Americas tension (Skip Atwater as the emblem); Severs doesn't consider his book "about class" but grants it's there and under-studied in IJ. [00:31–00:38]
  • Wallace and 2008: much in the work is predictive of the financial meltdown (financialization as bad news; the "Adult World" stochastic currency trader); cites Godden & Szalay's long article; explicitly rejects reading symbolism into the suicide's timing against the September 2008 meltdown ("his death is his death"). The cancelled GQ Obama-convention piece (intended follow-up to the McCain piece) is briefly imagined in the book. [00:38–00:43]
  • Pale King civics: "We are all of us brothers" as the one-sentence distillation of the late vision — which he complicates in teaching by asking why it isn't "brothers and sisters" (a gendered vision of community); the civic togetherness it fantasizes arrives only through bureaucracy and taxation, i.e. being an adult in an infantilizing consumer culture; A.O. Scott's end-of-adulthood essays as the matching diagnosis. [00:44–00:50]
  • Archive testimony: 3–4 weeks total at the Ransom Center, nugget-hunting (his comparison: Hering's method) rather than genetic reconstruction. Find: a drafted passage about pennies, prototyped as another of Hal's essays, never used in IJ. Also seen in the archive: Wallace's margin note on a draft (he thinks "Good Old Neon") to the effect that A.O. Scott had seen into his character (as aired). [00:49–00:52]
  • Grace: the book's "Dei Gratia" chapter (ASR "Dei Grazia"); Leonard Stecyk as "pathologically generous" marking the limit-case; Bucher adds the Lipsky-book detail of the Prayer of St. Ignatius postcard on Wallace's wall ("to give and not to count the cost"). Severs lands on Wallace as someone who wanted to believe in the possibility of gift-giving. [00:53–01:02]
  • Heirs: Zadie Smith and Jonathan Lethem as fellow blurbers of Hyde's The Gift; Lethem's "The Ecstasy of Influence" as the radicalized gift logic; Lethem took Wallace's Disney chair at Pomona (students enrolled for Wallace ended up graduating under Lethem). Chronic City discussed as an IJ-adjacent novel (Laird's first conference paper paired them; Burn's Reader's Guide does too). [01:02–01:05]
  • Career turning point: between 1988 and the intense IJ composition years (Syracuse, '91–'92). Westward read generously — the Depression-era farmer trying to pay Avis in grain vs. the kids' parental credit card as a key financial juxtaposition; Boswell's bridge-to-IJ argument endorsed. But the real answer offered is Gately: meeting Big Craig at Granada House and giving himself the freedom to write an uneducated intuitive — "the character who makes Infinite Jest a masterpiece" (Severs's book, p. 88, quoted by Laird; page ref AND wording ASR-approximate, unverified against the book). Lenore has much of it already but lacks Gately's literal and figurative stature. [01:05–01:13]
  • IJ as learned-while-written: the professional-conversationalist scene reads as late-80s Broom-era Wallace (a dating Severs grounds in the archive work behind the book); the Hal/Himself dynamic is adolescent, and Gately supplies the adult ballast — hence the baggy monster: Wallace learned how to write IJ over the course of writing it. [01:12–01:14]
  • "Humility job" is the novel's own term; Severs suspects it's one of the AA details Wallace embellished or invented. [01:14–01:15]
  • Mary Karr / Big Craig: Big Craig's impression of Wallace was a writer looking for material (D.T. Max); Karr has said (NY event with Max and Mark Costello, on YouTube) she was scandalized reading early IJ drafts because he had taken people's stories — the charge Severs's commonwealth-of-language reading answers (see Theories). Bucher recalls 1996 interviews where Wallace was disingenuous about just "going and listening" at open AA meetings. [01:15–01:17]
  • Keynote preview (2017 ISU conference, June 8–10, Bloomington-Normal; ~100 pre-registered): "Wallace and immanence," working title "We've been inside what we wanted all along" (the Kafka humor essay). He'd long planned a sonic Wallace (silence/sound/music) keynote instead and is saving it. [01:17–01:24]
  • Pynchon: Severs introduced as one of the preeminent Pynchon scholars; Brian McHale's "The Pale King; or, The White Visitation" as the essay on the Wallace–Pynchon question; McHale blurbed the book, as did previous-guest Lee Konstantinou and Heather Houser. [01:25–01:28]
  • Color: fourth recurring guest (ep. 17.1 was a 10-minute ISU-conference interview); Michener Center under Jim Magnuson (then in his final semester); the hosts' post-election gloom (UBC website traffic spike the night of Nov 8); Oscar-night picks (Severs: Moonlight all the way). [00:00–00:05, 01:32–01:37]

Theories & evidence

THEORY: Wallace's fiction is organized around axiology — images of balance and ground that demote economic value beneath moral and metaphysical value

  • Crux: axiology-value
  • Stance: advances
  • Evidence:
    • [draft] "Axiology" comes from Wallace's own dictionary notes (reprinted in part in Both Flesh and Not), defined there as the branch of philosophy dealing with value and how value gets judged. [00:11–00:12]
    • [inference] A young ETA player's claim to always know exactly where he stands (Severs's on-air rendering; the wording is not print-locatable) read as an in-joke: precisely what a ranking-scrutinized tennis kid doesn't know. [00:09]
    • [text] The wheelchair assassins as Kafka-derived physical embodiment of metaphysical states — nihilism, belieflessness, ironic detachment from anything axiomatic. [00:14]
    • [draft] An archival passage about pennies, drafted as another of Hal's essays and never used — economics history smuggled in via the book's essay habit (hero of action / hero of non-action). [00:51–00:52]
    • [inference] Wallace continually seeks concrete physical images (standing, feet on ground, yin-yang) for what in other writers stay metaphysical abstractions; value-as-foundation (axiom) connects to what-we-stand-on. [00:08–00:09, 00:14]
  • Notes: The book's thesis restated by its author at publication. He positions Wallace as neither Wittgensteinian nor Heideggerian: probing the axiomatic against the positivist fact/value split. Hosts push lightly on the "not a philosophical writer" self-description as disingenuous (the philosopher father); Severs half-grants it.

THEORY: IJ's AA is a gift economy — a commonwealth of language and stories, which answers the story-theft charge

  • Crux: aa-gift-economy
  • Stance: advances
  • Evidence:
    • [draft] Wallace's annotations in his copy of Lewis Hyde's The Gift: "IJ" written in the margins with notes relating Hyde's claims to the novel (dating of the annotations unknown). [00:55]
    • [author] Wallace blurbed The Gift's 25th-anniversary edition in glowing terms; a well-known fan of the book. [00:55]
    • [text] AA's pay-it-forward economy in IJ — print's epigram "You give it up to get it back to give it away." (p. 344, replacing the tape's variant recall) — a giving frame of mind as a necessary component of recovery, followed without questioning (Gately primary among the followers). [00:57–00:58]
    • [author] The copyright-page acknowledgment declining to name the AA people — read as honoring AA anonymity and extending anonymous credit to the people whose stories the book uses. [01:16]
    • [secondary] Mary Karr's on-record testimony that early IJ drafts scandalized her for taking people's stories — the charge the commonwealth reading is built to answer. [01:15–01:16]
    • [secondary] Adam Kelly (via Derrida on the gift): the impossibility of the pure gift parallels the impossibility of guaranteed sincerity — Severs's stated authority on the complication. [00:56]
  • Notes: Severs comes down on the wanting-to-believe side: Wallace skeptical of claimed generosity (Stecyk "pathologically generous") but invested in the gift as life practice, with the MacArthur and the AA favor network as biographical anchors.

THEORY: Wallace's continual subject is immanence — inside/outside is an illusion, and there is no door out of the self or of language

  • Crux: immanence-doors
  • Stance: advances
  • Evidence:
    • [text] Hal in the opening scene notices the EXIT signs and remarks that to a Latin-reader they would say "He leaves" — exits/entrances as the illusion of a dividable inside and outside. [01:20–01:23]
    • [text] This Is Water's fish parable as the best definition of immanence: the water is unrecognized because it is the medium. [01:20]
    • [inference] Door and gate imagery across the work — the gate in Gately's name; the Moltke duplex doors in "The Suffering Channel"; inside/outside as a preoccupation from Broom on — modeling a selfhood with no external vantage point. [01:23–01:24]
    • [secondary] Wittgenstein: language as an all-encompassing medium we cannot see outside of. [01:24]
  • Notes: Preview of a then-unwritten ISU keynote (working title "We've been inside what we wanted all along," from the Kafka humor essay) — a reading in progress, not the published book. Laird connects it, morbidly, to Wallace's own "exit."

THEORY: Wallace figures language as consumable in his capitalist grotesques — to insist that language is not a consumable object

  • Crux: language-consumption
  • Stance: advances
  • Evidence:
    • [text] Bombardini's eat-everything plan; Bucher reads from Severs's p. 46 (ASR-approximate page): Bombardini's scheme treats language as fueled by food — or as being food itself — a travesty of the biblical not-by-bread-alone. [00:23–00:24]
    • [text] Hal as vacuum-cleaner consumer — digesting the dictionary and everything he reads; memorization as consumption. [00:24]
    • [inference] Bombardini and Rick Vigorous as monologuers: hideousness as conversational consumption (Wallace as critic of the interview form's monologue drift). [00:25]
  • Notes: Bridges Broom and IJ; adjacent to the axiology thesis (language as the thing capitalist imagination wrongly converts to commodity).

THEORY: IJ's ETA / Ennet House pairing is deliberate class design — the great-American-novel requirement of different class positions

  • Crux: class-design
  • Stance: advances
  • Evidence:
    • [inference] The privileged tennis kids up the hill juxtaposed with the Ennet House residents down the hill — read as Wallace deciding a great American novel needs people of different class positions; hard labor (reader's and writer's) continually juxtaposed with a dissolute consumerist society that doesn't know where its value comes from. [00:33–00:38]
  • Notes: Offered when Bucher presses class as a key issue of the book; Severs calls class in IJ "a kind of untapped area" of study while denying his book is fundamentally about class.

THEORY: Wallace denied a Pynchon influence that is really there (anxiety of influence)

  • Crux: pynchon-influence
  • Stance: endorses
  • Evidence:
    • [secondary] Brian McHale's "The Pale King; or, The White Visitation": Wallace mimicked Gravity's Rainbow sentences even where he made no overt allusion. [01:26]
    • [author] Wallace's denials — claiming not to know The Crying of Lot 49, or to have read it only after writing Broom. [01:27]
    • [inference] He wrote at explicit length about Barth while avoiding Pynchon — the avoidance pattern itself read as anxiety of influence (Bucher advancing, Severs endorsing via McHale). [01:26–01:27]
  • Notes: Little Wallace–Pynchon criticism exists despite the connection; Severs flagged as the rare scholar covering both.

Themes

Value and economics (the master frame: axiology, balance, ground, anti-neoliberalism); addiction-and-recovery (AA as gift economy; humility jobs; Gately as turning point); communication-and-solipsism (immanence — no door out of self or language; monologuing); entertainment-and-the-self (consumer infantilization, Adult World, end-of-adulthood); work, class, and civics (ETA/Ennet, Pale King bureaucracy, "we are all of us brothers").

Cross-references

Advances