IJ study archive

The Great Concavity Ep. 46: Marshall Boswell — The Wallace Effect, the anxiety of Wallace's influence, and the anti-Wallace backlash (recorded ~February 2019)

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TL;DR

The author of the field's foundational monograph (Understanding David Foster Wallace, 2003 — see boswell-understanding-dfw) promoting The Wallace Effect (Bloomsbury, published the month before — "came out last month, January," so ~Feb 2019). Almost no IJ plot-crux content: the hour is literary-field history — how Barth/Powers anticipated Wallace's program, how Eugenides/Franzen/Messud/Groff write Wallace into their novels as a rival to defeat, and a considered treatment of the Hungerford/"lit-bro" backlash. The one first-order IJ datum is priceless: Boswell's only contact with Wallace was a letter Wallace returned footnoted, dodging direct questions about Subsidized Time and whether Joelle is deformed or too beautiful — author-side evidence the book's ambiguities were guarded. ASR transcript: paraphrase only.

Key claims

  • The footnoted letter (his only contact with Wallace, ~2001-02, while writing Understanding DFW): Wallace sent Boswell's letter back annotated with numbered footnotes ("I'm Marshall Boswell¹" → flip over → "hi" and a smiley), agreed to answer questions about Subsidized Time and the Joelle question, then dodged all of them — "none of it was usable." The handwritten yellow-legal-pad answers are still in Boswell's office. [00:04–00:05]
  • Origin of Understanding DFW: his query to South Carolina Press was multiple-choice — Powers, Franzen, Rick Moody, or Wallace — and the press picked Wallace because "someone's already doing Powers"; the book was written to go up for full professor; in those years it was genuinely uncertain which of that cohort would "launch." [00:05–00:06]
  • Stephen Burn contacted him about weighing in again about a year after the suicide, "much more prescient" about the coming groundswell; Boswell now can't keep up with the field ("my foot was attached to a train"). [00:06–00:07]
  • Bucher's own prehistory: working at Columbia University Press ~2001-02 he phoned Boswell and mailed him Xeroxes of material that existed nowhere online — "the Dylan tapes." [00:02–00:03]
  • The Wallace Effect genesis: a stalled Prisoner's Dilemma essay (the Powers/Wallace overlap swallowed it); a years-old conviction that Westward's attack on Barth was incomplete — Wallace concealed how much he borrowed from Barth "down to the fonts"; and reading The Marriage Plot, where the Leonard-is-Wallace clueing (bandana, skull, everywhere) crystallized the book. [00:12–00:14]
  • Tidewater Tales thesis: Barth had already made the move (metafiction that loves its reader, addressed to the world) that Wallace claimed his generation would make; Boswell is convinced Wallace read it "with great avid attention" and then "had to create a Barth that didn't write that book in order to have the patriarch he was going to kill" — filed with Wallace's denials of having read Crying of Lot 49 / Gravity's Rainbow. [00:17–00:19]
  • The Wallace-figure as sexual dynamo: both Freedom (Richard Katz) and The Marriage Plot (Leonard) stage the reckoning as a love triangle, with the Wallace stand-in irresistible and the author-surrogate losing the woman to him. [00:30]
  • Claire Messud's The Emperor's Children (2006) is the only novel to write Wallace in while he was alive (the kid reading IJ in the bathtub; Bootie's Amherst scenes referencing Broom); Boswell's line: Bootie is "that Wallace-esque infant," a doughy man-child trailing spilled food and human waste — read against IJ's goo-prone-infant imagery and the Concavity's infants. Her irony position overlaps her husband James Wood's; Wood (like Eggers, whose 1996 SF Chronicle review trashed IJ before his 2006 reversal) changed his tune on Wallace posthumously. [00:52–00:57]
  • Franzen's contract/status essay read as competition: Wallace galled Franzen by having both status and contract (the strangers at the office door), so the essay splits them and crowns Franzen king of contract; hosts note the Freedom hype included Franzen starting it the day after Wallace's memorial service and writing it in a year. Boswell rates Powers, not Franzen, as the writer toe-to-toe with Wallace for "the heir to Pynchon" scepter, with the long-term jury still out. [00:23–00:29]
  • The encyclopedic-novel frame: Edward Mendelson's genre (coined ~1976 to explain Gravity's Rainbow) — engage a science, multiple discourses, express a culture's ideological underpinnings, be long — and IJ checks every box (see Theories). Franzen and Eugenides haven't written "the kinds of books you can write dissertations on forever." [00:48–00:49]
  • The Hungerford chapter: the "on not reading DFW" essay was forwarded to him ~20 times; concurrent links (Jamie Loftus eating IJ page by page, the IJ bong, "my boyfriend made me read IJ" snark) fed the chapter; his position — she's free not to read it, but arguing against reading a book you haven't read is "irresponsible critically." The chapter was finished and delivered before Mary Karr's tweets (which, hosts note, contained nothing not already in the 2012 D.T. Max biography). Groff's Fates and Furies is his chosen nuanced counter-text on the "Jurassic vision of [male] genius"; the Gilbert & Gubar / Bloom scaffolding: Wallace chose a male genius-genealogy and so unwittingly affirmed it. [00:36–00:47]
  • Readership gender datum: hosts report their circles (conferences, wallace-l, listeners) run ~50/50; Boswell answers honestly that the field is "largely male," but his (mostly female) senior seminars — IJ taught three times in six years — show women falling in love with the book while in argument with it; he urges the Wallace (and Updike) communities to welcome the critiques ("can't I criticize what I love?" — Morrison's guitar). [00:40–00:44]
  • Redgate preview: Jamie Redgate's forthcoming book (from the dissertation Burn had him read) maps Wallace's model of cognition and the self, steeped in neuroscience and Cartesian philosophy, with close attention to ghosts and the afterlife (see Theories). [00:07–00:08]
  • Understanding DFW reissue announced on-air: expanded edition "next year" (i.e. 2020) adding The Pale King and Oblivion — matches the archive's record of the 2020 edition. [01:07]
  • Color: the "only door-knocking novel" line (20 years of teaching, only IJ compels strangers to lurk outside his office); Bruce Hornsby's song "Echolocation" influenced by The Pale King (Bucher); Boswell's grad-school band Enormous Richard opened for Uncle Tupelo in 1988-89. [00:09–00:10, 01:03, 01:05]

Theories & evidence

THEORY: IJ's central ambiguities are authorially guarded — Wallace declined to resolve them even in private, direct correspondence

  • Crux: designed-holes
  • Stance: advances
  • Evidence:
    • [author] Wallace's footnoted reply to Boswell's letter (~2001-02): he agreed to answer questions on Subsidized Time and on the deformed-versus-veiled-beauty Joelle crux, "and he dodged all of it. None of it was usable" (ASR, approximate). [00:04–00:05]
  • Notes: Boswell offers this as biography/anecdote, not argument, but it is primary author-behavior evidence for the designed-holes reading (cf. Carlisle's structural version in gc-ep040). The physical yellow-legal-pad answers survive in his office — a W6-grade artifact lead.

THEORY: Joelle is either hideously deformed or so beautiful she veils — the veil question as a live crux

  • Crux: joelle-veil
  • Stance: mentions
  • Evidence:
    • none offered — the question is name-checked as one of the things he asked Wallace directly and got no usable answer on. [00:05]
  • Notes: Counted as a popularity sighting: the veil question was already the ask-the-author question circa 2001-02.

THEORY: IJ is a self-conscious, box-checking bid to join the encyclopedic-novel canon, modeled on Gravity's Rainbow

  • Crux: encyclopedic-design
  • Stance: advances
  • Evidence:
    • [secondary] Mendelson's encyclopedic-novel criteria (engage a science, deploy multiple discourses, express a culture's ideological underpinnings, length) — "you can check them off one by one." [00:48]
    • [inference] The resemblance to Gravity's Rainbow runs down to how the chapters are split up and how the font looks on the page — "everything about it was a very self-conscious attempt to be part of a specific tradition" (ASR, approximate); the Joyce/Pynchon analogs are "announced, clear" in the book. [00:48–00:50]
  • Notes: New crux slug. Sits in tension with Wallace's on-record denials of having read Crying of Lot 49 / Gravity's Rainbow, which Boswell and the hosts file with Eugenides's "hilarious denials" that Leonard is Wallace. [00:19–00:20]

THEORY: The compatibility of cynicism and naivete is the announced key to IJ (and to Wallace's whole project)

  • Crux: cynicism-naivete
  • Stance: advances
  • Evidence:
    • [text] The recurring formulation — in IJ the "queerly persistent U.S. myth that cynicism and naïveté are mutually exclusive" (p. 694; page ref ASR-derived, checks out against print) — appears three times in Wallace per Boswell, the others in E Unibus Pluram and Westward — always in the negative formulation, which Boswell reads as an invitation to work out what is meant. [00:57–00:58]
    • [text] The naivete pole embodied in IJ's single-entendre figures (Mario) and The Pale King's earnest IRS examiners; the cynicism pole in irony, self-consciousness, metafiction. [00:59]
    • [secondary] Adam Kelly's "metafiction with sincerity" cited as the same doubleness named from outside. [00:59]
  • Notes: New crux slug (thematic-structural rather than plot). His gloss on Wallace vs. the Wood/Messud line: Wallace is not anti-irony — irony "has emergency use" — whereas Messud is ironic about sincerity itself and may be "slightly misreading Wallace." [01:00]

THEORY: Wallace's ghosts and afterlife are a genuine holdout for the possibility of a soul

  • Crux: wraith-reality
  • Stance: endorses
  • Evidence:
    • [secondary] Jamie Redgate's dissertation-turned-book (read by Boswell at Burn's request): a full map of Wallace's model of cognition/selfhood in which the recurring ghosts signal a reserved place for the soul; Boswell compares the same holdout in George Saunders. [00:08]
  • Notes: Sighted secondhand and endorsed as "a pretty important book"; no on-air argument from the novel itself. Boswell separately name-checks "the whole Jim and [Incandenza] wraith business of speaking in someone else's brain voice" as the book's escape-from-solipsism engine — the wraith scene treated as the thematic core, its ontology unargued. [00:11]

Themes

Irony-and-sincerity (the cynicism/naivete doubleness as the master claim); communication-and-solipsism (escape via another consciousness through a text — why strangers knock on his door; the wraith's brain-voice); entertainment-and-ambition (status vs. contract, the encyclopedic bid, fame-hunger shared by the rivals); reception and gender (the backlash chapter, the readership question) — largely a Wallace-studies/context episode rather than an in-novel one.

Cross-references

Advances