IJ study archive

Three Guardian DFW pieces: Leith's 'IJ at 20' explainer, D.T. Max contra St. Dave, Colin Barrett's 'My Hero'

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TL;DR

The three Guardian pieces the Jane Topping blog cluster spawned (see ij-visual-materials): Sam Leith's 20-item anniversary explainer (2016-02-26) — a listicle of checkable claims, several of which take sides on contested points or just get the text wrong; D.T. Max's anti-hagiography essay (2015-10-09) — the biographer arguing that St.-Dave worship flattens the "treacherous, more darkly complicated" writer and makes the redemptive Gately reading of IJ too easy; and Colin Barrett's short "My Hero" appreciation (2014-07-12). Value verdicts, one line each: Leith — useful mainly as a specimen of what the 2016 press got right and wrong (digested against the archive, below); Max — a real interpretive stance from a primary authority, pairs with dtmax-every-love-story; Barrett — charming, one crux-adjacent sentence, otherwise biography-of-the-reader.

Sam Leith, "Infinite Jest at 20: 20 things you need to know" (2016-02-26)

TL;DR: twenty numbered factoids mixing plot summary, publication history, and biography, pitched at Guardian readers who haven't read the book. Breezy and mostly accurate; where it errs, it errs confidently.

Key claims (the ones that check out)

  • Subsidized-year roster (sec. 1): all nine sponsored years incl. the full Yushityu mouthful — matches the archive's Subsidized Time table (no order asserted, so no YDAU-mapping conflict possible).
  • Feral-hamster lore (sec. 7): herd descended from Ward and June, freed by a Watertown NY boy in the Year of the Whopper — matches scene 030 (pp. 92-93) exactly, incl. the names.
  • Concavity territory (sec. 7): Maine/Vermont/New Hampshire plus some upstate NY — consistent with scenes 030/086 (former Vermont, central Maine, NNY, the Syracuse-Ticonderoga-Salem disaster line).
  • Suicide idiom (sec. 19): "eliminating your own map" / "felo de se" — matches the novel's demapping idiom (scenes 068/069).
  • Bio/publication material sourced to D.T. Max's biography (sections 3, 12-14, 16): Gately based on "Big Craig," the 600-pages-cut letter, the Beethoven-on-loop proofreading, Sally Foster behind Avril and the Militant Grammarians, greebles/howling fantods — all consistent with dtmax-every-love-story.
  • Sierpinski structure (sec. 8) sourced to the 1996 interview — the archive holds the primary at silverblatt-bookworm-1996.
  • Hype/reception (sections 9–10): sixth printing in a month (matches the judkacag infographic row in INVENTORY); the Dale Peck and Harold Bloom pans, with the nice catch that IJ itself calls Bloom's prose "stupefyingly turgid-sounding shit."
  • Fan apparatus (sec. 18): wallacewiki; Ryan Compton's counts (20,584-word vocabulary over 577,608 words — word total matches the judkacag row).
  • Eschaton in the culture (sec. 11): the Decemberists' "Calamity Song" video stages the game.
  • brickjest (sec. 15): built by an 11-year-old, Sebastian, with his English-professor father — NB this reverses Topping's credit ("Sebastian Griffith and his son"); flagged in ij-visual-materials since INVENTORY currently follows Topping.

Accuracy notes

Where Leith takes sides on contested points or conflicts with the record, quoted as he printed them:

# Leith says The record says
sec. 2 the Entertainment is "the missing master copy of a videotape" it's a cartridge — "the Entertainment"/samizdat, Infinite Jest (V?), in the novel's InterLace-cartridge media ecology
sec. 2 anyone who sees it "will in due course expire" — lethality stated flat textually strong (the attaché arc) but a genuinely open question; he states a reading as plot fact
sec. 6 Joelle "was disfigured by acid" before joining the U.H.I.D. an open question argued both ways (beautiful vs. deformed); Carlisle's both-in-sequence reading is the best-evidenced (gc-ep040); Leith picks the acid side without flagging the dispute
sec. 11 Eschaton "played across six tennis courts" four — "an open expanse equal to the area of four contiguous tennis courts" (p. 322). Possibly a shared fan misreading: the Ayers infographic also draws a 3×2 court grid
sec. 3 Gately is "the chief counsellor" at Ennet House Gately is a live-in Staffer (ex-resident; cook/night duties); Pat Montesian is the Director
sec. 3 Ennet House is "next door" to E.T.A. it's downhill — E.T.A. "looks down its hill's steepest, best-planted decline" into Enfield Marine (p. 242); adjacent-ish, but the vertical relation is the novel's architecture
sec. 6 "Les Assassins des Fauteils Rollents" the novel's own (already idiosyncratic) spelling is "Fauteuils Rollents"
sec. 12 "at 1,100-odd pages" 1,079 (Max's own piece next door gets it right)

Of the eight, the first four are genuine side-takings; the last four are looseness or typo tier.

D.T. Max, "Why David Foster Wallace should not be worshipped as a secular saint" (2015-10-09)

TL;DR: the biographer, prompted by The End of the Tour and the DFW-portrait cottage industry, argues that canonizing "St. Dave" — moral guru of This Is Water — is hurting our ability to read him. His IJ-specific move: the redemptive Gately arc is why the book is paradoxically the easiest Wallace for the new loyalist to read, and the less consoling ETA-kids material is the book's more vibrant side and the one his later work actually continues.

Key claims

  • The saint industry catalogued: the Pistoia oil portrait with the Jesus cast, T-shirts, tattoos, the This Is Water dramatization (4M views before the estate takedown), the Illinois State conferences "as much a place for devotees as academics" — and his own biography implicated ("the form's obligatory contradiction").
  • Wallace is "not famous for being famous; he's famous for being moral" — and the mourning is personal in a way Plath/Berryman/Woolf worship isn't (Hallberg: "polymathic, ironic, brilliant, damaged, and under intense pressure to perform").
  • "What is essential in Wallace is not the goodness... but the struggle to get to that goodness."
  • Archival: a Texas archive sheet from months after IJ's publication — "I'm back to thinking IJ was a fluke. I feel nothing lapidary inside."
  • Revisionist biographical suggestion: the standard post-IJ story (paralyzed by fear of not matching it) may be incomplete — Wallace may have grown less interested in writing anything like IJ again, accepting Zadie Smith's "difficult gifts" as his real mode.

Colin Barrett, "My hero: David Foster Wallace" (2014-07-12)

TL;DR: a young Irish writer's conversion narrative — reading IJ on the tram killed his "brittle, evasive poems" and started him writing prose. One line-worthy formal observation (below); otherwise a reception document.

Key claims

  • Positions IJ in the Pynchon/Gaddis/McElroy lineage; "crypto-apocalyptic, science-fiction-tainted satire and tragedy" beneath which sits "extraordinary compassion and empathy."
  • Reads Hal and Gately as the deliberate pairing of "a gifted, vulnerable but insufferably snide little prick" and "an older, wiser, fundamentally decent man," with the narrative hinging "tantalisingly on the prospect of their exasperatingly deferred, but surely inevitable, connection."

Theories & evidence

THEORY: Joelle was really disfigured by thrown acid; the veil covers deformity

  • Crux: joelle-veil
  • Stance: endorses
  • Evidence:
    • [inference] None offered — stated as plot fact in the P.G.O.A.T./U.H.I.D. gloss. [Leith sec. 6]
  • Notes: the explainer genre presenting one side of a live crux as summary; see the Accuracy notes table.

THEORY: IJ is structured as a Sierpinski gasket

  • Crux: annular-structure
  • Stance: endorses
  • Evidence:
    • [author] DFW's 1996 interview statement, quoted: "Its chaos is more on the surface. Its bones are its beauty." [Leith sec. 8]
  • Notes: relays the Bookworm-era authorial claim the archive holds in the primary (silverblatt-bookworm-1996).

THEORY: The Entertainment is lethal — viewers watch until they expire

  • Crux: entertainment-lethality
  • Stance: endorses
  • Evidence:
    • [inference] None offered — stated flat in the plot summary. [Leith sec. 2]

THEORY: IJ is "pretty much a valentine to Alcoholics Anonymous" — but that redemptive reading is the book's least vibrant side

  • Crux: ij-aa-love-letter
  • Stance: entertains
  • Evidence:
    • [secondary] A friend of Wallace's described the book to Max as "pretty much a valentine to Alcoholics Anonymous." [Max ¶6]
    • [inference] The ETA children "don't solve their spiritual problems as ably as Gately," and it's their desultory questing — not the redemptive arc — that Brief Interviews, Oblivion, and Pale King continue. [Max ¶7]
  • Notes: Max's counter-reading is the piece's actual thesis: the valentine reading is real but is what the St.-Dave cult selects for.

THEORY: Gately finds the strength to survive his trauma without relapsing

  • Crux: gately-fate
  • Stance: endorses
  • Evidence:
    • [inference] None offered — "finds the inner strength to survive physical trauma without retreating to addiction," stated as summary. [Max ¶6]
  • Notes: matches the archive's near-consensus (Gately survives; see the-ending), stated here from the biographer's chair.

THEORY: The narrative hinges on Hal and Gately's deferred but "surely inevitable" connection

  • Crux: ending-missing-year
  • Stance: entertains
  • Evidence:
    • [inference] The two central characters are designed as complements (snide prodigy / decent ex-con), so the deferred connection reads as the book's intended hinge. [Barrett ¶3]
  • Notes: a reader's-instinct version of the convergence consensus (the grave-dig corroborations); Barrett projects it beyond the frame without naming any mechanism.

Themes

Reception and canonization (Max, Barrett); addiction/AA and the Gately arc (Max, Leith sections 3–4); entertainment/the samizdat (Leith); Joelle/U.H.I.D. and disability-deformity (Leith); Eschaton and map-territory (Leith sec. 11); family-Hamlet (Leith sections 16–17); irony vs sincerity (Leith sec. 20, quoting the prisoner-who's-come-to-love-his-cage line).

Cross-references

Notable passages

  • Leith sec. 10: Bloom's "Stephen King is Cervantes compared with Wallace" vs IJ's own "stupefyingly turgid-sounding shit" — the feud in two quotes.
  • Leith sec. 20: "Irony's gone from liberating to enslaving. There's some great essay somewhere that has a line about irony being the song of the prisoner who's come to love his cage" — DFW quoted; cf. E Unibus Pluram.
  • Max: "the capture of DFW by the smart side of the self-help movement may be hurting our ability to read the treacherous, more darkly complicated, brilliant writer he really was."
  • Max, from the Texas archives: "I'm back to thinking IJ was a fluke. I feel nothing lapidary inside."
  • Barrett: "Here is the head that pounds like a heart."
  • Barrett: "Infinite Jest gave me back to myself, and left me with nowhere to hide."

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