IJ study archive

The Great Concavity Ep. 27: Jill Braithwaite — Infinite Jest and Paul Tillich: sin as estrangement, salvation as existential process (recorded ~mid-March 2017)

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TL;DR

The GC theology episode: Jill Braithwaite (MA thesis: Dying to Give Our Lives Away: Infinite Jest as a Rich Resource for a Renewed Theology of Sin and Salvation, unpublished, seminary library in suburban Minneapolis) reads IJ through Paul Tillich (ASR "tillick"/"tilice") — sin as estrangement from the ground of being, salvation as existential process, the novel as a Tillichian "symbolic window." Host Dave Laird's own theology MA (Mario, the hell-sized hole) makes this a three-way scholars' conversation rather than an interview. Datable to ~mid-March 2017 (daylight-savings change "yesterday-ish," first day of spring break, the Federer–Nadal Australian Open 2017 final fresh, Lincoln in the Bardo half-read). Locator caveat: this auto-transcript is a single unbroken blob with only an opening 00:00:00 stamp, so locators below are approximate percent-positions through the transcript text, not timestamps. Paraphrase only.

Key claims

  • Pale King sec. 1 provenance: Braithwaite has seen the order of the manuscript stack left on Wallace's desk, and sec. 1 ("we are all of us brothers") was not the opening — the placement is Pietsch's choice, which she doesn't fault. [~3%]
  • The sec. 1 text was published in TriQuarterly in 2002 as "Peoria (4)" (a second excerpt ran as "Peoria"), and is not credited as previously published on the Pale King copyright page — a standing gripe of Bucher's. Links to Hering's find that a working PK title was "What Is Peoria For?" (the will-it-play-in-Peoria idea). [~10–11%]
  • "Invaginate volunteer beans": volunteer plants are real; "invaginate" as the adjective is almost certainly Wallace's invention — one or two of the sec. 1 grasses are made up. [~1%]
  • Brief Interviews germ: the granola-cruncher piece (B.I. #20) has the victim looking at the same evocative vegetation — shatter cane, lamb's quarter, cut grass — a decade before PK's publication; Bucher blogged this in 2011 (simpleranger.net). [~12%]
  • Guest bio: 20+ years in children's publishing (Lerner; previously Capstone, where she created the PebbleGo research database); MA in theology and the arts; made three handmade books using Wallace texts, the first from PK sec. 1 — which she read aloud the previous weekend at a friend's funeral (shared Midwestern identity). Denomination: Unitarian Universalist. [~4–6%, ~22–24%]
  • Discovery story: found Wallace in real time via the three Harper's essays (state fair, cruise ship, grammar); remembers the IJ postcard marketing campaign at Baxter's Books, Minneapolis; read a loaned orange paperback entirely in bed (too heavy to carry), mourned it at the end. Her sister, finishing IJ a month before recording, described it as feeling like a death in the family (as aired). [~36–38%]
  • Second read, 2011: reread IJ while gearing up to quit smoking, to face the mechanics of addiction; was doing 12-step work at the time (not an addict beyond cigarettes) and got interested in higher-power theology — the key insight being surrender: you are not the one running things. First day without cigarettes she kept being surprised her limbs were still attached — which she maps onto Hal's fear of flying apart. [~39–41%, ~75%]
  • State of the field datum: at the 2014 DFW conference there was almost nothing on Wallace and religion; the wave (she says smart people started writing on Wallace and theology around 2008–2010) crested just as she finished her thesis; her 2014 conference title had Laird fearing his thesis had already been written. [~7–8%]
  • Tillich crash course (her framework, compressed): systematic theology needs a core conviction, method, notion of God, creation, anthropology (what's wrong with us), salvation, eschatology; Tillich's correlation method answers questions arising from the existential "human situation"; God is not a being but the ground of being / being-itself (hence, he argues, no real atheism); paired with Sally McFague's (ASR "mcfeig") panentheist embodiment theology. Modern theology's problem is not death and afterlife but meaninglessness, despair, anxiety. [~43–65%]
  • Wallace had been in AA only about four years when he turned IJ in — the theological interests deepen visibly later (see Theories). [~62%]
  • Bad theology is politics: her answer to Bucher's why-hasn't-this-trickled-down-to-the-megachurches lament (Carlton Pearson's universal-reconciliation exile as the case study): much popular US theology is politics/sociology wearing religious language, but still "religion" in the Wallace/Tillich sense — ask what is being worshipped (shareholder value counts). Quotes David Dark's Life's Too Short to Pretend You're Not Religious ("show me your receipts... the space of your worship is the space of your life" — ASR rendering of Dark's wording, unverified). [~58–61%]
  • Both guest and host have preached actual church sermons built on the Kenyon speech (hers: "What Is Beauty For?" — realizing that unattended, what she worshipped was safety; beauty as pointer toward the holy). [~77–79%]
  • Proposed on-air co-project (Braithwaite + Laird): contextualizing Wallace among the 20th-century liberal Protestant theologians (Tillich, the Niebuhr brothers) — Wallace, in their view, belonging squarely in that company. [~89%]
  • Archive lead: Denny Kinlaw told her (2014 or 2015 conference) there is a Tillich book in Wallace's library at the Ransom Center; Bucher, headed to the archive "in two days," promises to check. Unverified on-air. [~90%]
  • Wallace's other religious touchstones cited: Screwtape Letters (recalled on air as among the most profound books he had ever read), Brian Moore's Catholics (recommended to Zadie Smith); Paul Elie's The Life You Save May Be Your Own and the novel/Christianity parallel (each centers an ordinary human life). [~90–92%]
  • Prior-guest callback: Edmund Waldstein (Cistercian monk episode) on encountering the divine through pain and boredom — a 180 from the culture's comfort-worship; Franzen's Freedom mentioned as a response to IJ and the Kenyon-speech idea of real freedom. [~72%, ~77%]
  • Episode closes with Braithwaite reading PK sec. 1 aloud in full. [~94%]
  • Color: long Federer digression (the AO 2017 final over Nadal as resurrection narrative; Skidelsky's Federer and Me; "is Federer better at tennis than Wallace was at writing?"); Laird's contrarian take that IJ alone — not the essays — is what buys Wallace literary immortality. [~25–35%]

Theories & evidence

THEORY: Infinite Jest works as a Tillichian symbolic window onto sin and salvation — a live theological resource, not just a novel about addiction

  • Crux: theology-sin-salvation
  • Stance: advances
  • Evidence:
    • [secondary] Tillich's theology of art and of symbols: a symbol points beyond itself to ultimate reality, participates in what it symbolizes, reveals what can be approached no other way, and opens up the viewer/reader — the four-part test she applies to IJ. [~52%]
    • [secondary] Tillich called Picasso's Guernica the most successful Protestant artwork — the human situation laid bare — supplying the template: secular art bearing the sacred (his broken secular/sacred divide; cf. Schaeffer). [~49–56%]
    • [inference] IJ's sheer scope is itself the statement: a 300-page Hal-only story was possible, but the vast sweeping cast of estranged characters is what makes it an effective symbolic window on estrangement. [~68%]
    • [text] Marathe's everyone-worships argument and the "dying to give our lives away" material as direct expressions of the Tillichian claim that faith is universal — matching the Kenyon speech. [~69%]
    • [secondary] Tillich: modernity's affliction is anxiety, despair, and felt meaninglessness (not hell/afterlife) — the register IJ operates in. [~57%]
  • Notes: Her thesis's core argument, stated as written: IJ offers Unitarian Universalism (which she says has discarded sin and salvation — "an impoverished notion" of human life, per an actual UU brochure she cited) a resource for reimagining both, via Tillich's theology of art plus his sin/salvation doctrine. Extraction only; no support-judgment.

THEORY: Hal is the novel's supreme symbol of estrangement — sin as alienation from God, self, and others

  • Crux: hal-estrangement
  • Stance: advances
  • Evidence:
    • [text] The passage that inside Hal there is nothing at all — no bona fide intensity-of-interior-life emotion since he was tiny — building layer by layer to the terrifically simple close, "he is lonely" (ASR, approximate). [~70%]
    • [text] The Hal–Mario conversations: the hole that is "A way more than Hal-sized hole." (p. 785 — print reads Hal-sized; the tape's hell-sized is an as-heard variant) and God's "laid-back management style" (p. 41) — Hal explicitly failing to connect with anything godlike; his fear of flying apart in the same section. [~74%]
    • [inference] Hal has every comfort and nothing to prove — family, money, talent, effortless smarts — yet is miserable: estrangement is a spiritual reality, not a circumstance. He gets "little glimmers" but is frozen where Gately surrenders (a what-is, she stresses, not a blame). [~80–81%]
    • [secondary] Tillich: estrangement is not merely psychological but an inescapable spiritual reality — humans as they exist are not what they essentially are — with the personal element (choice, responsibility) retained in the word "sin." [~63–64%]
  • Notes: Thematic, not causal — she takes no position on what broke Hal (no DMZ/withdrawal/Entertainment mechanics anywhere in the episode). Laird's frame — whether you are a Hal or a Gately — with Clipperton as the death-in-life limit case, sits alongside. [~80%]

THEORY: Gately is IJ's contemporary symbol of salvation — salvation as existential process grounded in practice, story, empathy, community, and accepted grace, not belief

  • Crux: gately-salvation
  • Stance: advances
  • Evidence:
    • [text] Gately gets on his knees and surrenders even though he believes nothing — the act of the whole person, not intellectual assent to doctrine, is how he gets there; he takes the step himself. [~81%]
    • [text] The Blind Faith passage, in print's words: "and now if the older guys say Jump you ask them to hold their hand at the desired height, and now they’ve got you, and you’re free." (p. 351 — the tape's say-how-high rendering was the guest's recall; print's joke is the hand-at-the-desired-height), read as one of the novel's build-then-simple-statement crescendos: things come down to you're free or you're lonely. She'd love to see a thesis arguing it is the crescendo of the novel. [~71%]
    • [text] Gately's bottom — the easy high turning very much not easy; the moment of clarity / dark night of the soul as where grace strikes; paralleled with Tillich's sermon "You Are Accepted." [~69–70%]
    • [inference] Smartness explicitly won't do it in this novel (many characters demonstrate this); faith unites the rational and non-rational, and something about God/faith stays inarticulable — Tillich's one literal statement (God is being-itself; the rest is symbols) mapped onto IJ's banal-platitudes-that-work. [~84–85%]
    • [inference] Quoting her thesis (paraphrased per ASR discipline): in Gately Wallace creates a symbol of salvation located in chosen faith grounded in practice, the power of story and empathy, community, and acceptance of grace — we stop giving ourselves away to finite concerns and find wholeness in connection to a higher power. [~82%]
  • Notes: Bucher's gloss: this is theology from a writer who had lived through real damage — insight from experience, which is why Wallace wrote an AA novel at all. No claim made about Gately's survival — the salvation reading runs on the AA arc, not the ending.

THEORY: Mario occupies a different spiritual plane — the novel's native embodiment of wholeness, who extends grace to others

  • Crux: mario-grace
  • Stance: advances
  • Evidence:
    • [text] Mario extends grace to other characters — Barry Loach and Eric Clipperton named. [~87%]
    • [inference] Gately and Mario as different "stations" of salvation (Laird's thesis chapter, presented at the 2016 conference): Gately formerly alienated and coming into wholeness through a grace-community; Mario embodying it in himself from the start. [~86–87%]
    • [secondary] Michael O'Connell (per Laird's correspondence): Wallace is still working in Christian existentialism with Mario, against the tidier "Buddhist character" reading. [~88%]
    • [inference] The burned/injured either rise above it or succumb; Mario is oblivious to his damage — innocence that doesn't fit classic estrangement, which is exactly why Braithwaite's thesis passes over him ("he didn't fit the argument"). [~88%]
  • Notes: Speaker attribution matters here: Laird advances (it's his thesis material — Braithwaite jokes it should have been titled "We Need to Talk About Mario"); Braithwaite endorses the line of inquiry while confirming Mario is absent from her own argument. Both flag Mario as under-discussed in the scholarship.

THEORY: Wallace moved more directly into theology as his career went on

  • Crux: wallace-theology-arc
  • Stance: advances
  • Evidence:
    • [inference] The Pale King as the evidence-in-chief (Bucher): the abortion material, higher powers, boredom/suffering as encounter — the late work reads as directly theological where IJ is obliquely so. [~9%, ~62%]
    • [author] Wallace was only ~4 years into AA when he delivered IJ; the higher-power wrestling visible there matures afterward. [~62%]
    • [secondary] Maria Bustillos's essay (in Gesturing Toward Reality) on the "not me" higher-power insight and Wallace's developing interest in Christian theology — "a validating essay" for her thesis. [~41%]
    • [draft] The reported Tillich book in Wallace's Ransom library (via Denny Kinlaw; unverified, Bucher to check on an imminent archive trip). [~90%]
    • [author] Wallace's Screwtape Letters superlative and the Brian Moore Catholics recommendation to Zadie Smith as further religious-reading anchors. [~90–91%]
  • Notes: Braithwaite adds the open question of influence vs. convergence: she doesn't know how much Wallace actually knew of the liberal Protestant theologians he overlaps with — the proposed Braithwaite/Laird co-project is exactly to find out. [~89%]

THEORY: Who narrates Infinite Jest (the narrator is not a single transparent voice)

  • Crux: ij-narrator
  • Stance: mentions
  • Evidence:
    • none offered — Bucher name-checks the existing body of theorizing over who really narrates stretches of the book, while claiming a lot of Wallace shines through biographically. [~41%]
  • Notes: Counted as a popularity sighting only.

Themes

Addiction-and-recovery (higher power, surrender, hitting bottom, her own quit-smoking frame); communication-and-solipsism (estrangement as the sin concept; Hal's inner emptiness; the inarticulable); entertainment-and-the-self (everyone worships; comfort/safety-worship; suffering and boredom as the refused teachers); grace and salvation (Gately, Mario); the body and tennis (automaticity, Federer as kinesthetic beauty — the episode's secular liturgy).

Cross-references

Advances