IJ study archive

D.T. Max and James Wood on David Foster Wallace (Mahindra Humanities Center, Harvard)

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TL;DR

A 117-minute Harvard event (c. late 2012, on the Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story tour) — the biographer in long conversation with the critic who gave IJ a mixed-to-positive Guardian review and panned Oblivion. Two student readings open it (the Gately/toothbrush-Polaroid burglary sequence and the cruise-ship despair passage), then Max gives a compressed life-of-Wallace with several details sharper than the round-1 sources, and Wood pushes him on biography-as-form, realism, influence, boredom, and the suicide. The single richest new biographical-critical source in the round-2 batch. Auto-captions: paraphrase only, no verbatim authority.

Key claims

  • Setting matters: the event is in Emerson Hall, where Wallace spent his ~3-6 weeks as a Harvard philosophy PhD student in fall 1989 before McLean and Granada House; the intro frames Granada House as the basis of the Gately sections (~min 1-4).
  • Student reading #1 (~min 11-21) is the Don Gately introduction: the toothbrush-Polaroid revenge on the North Shore A.D.A. and the DuPlessis burglary ("Kite" unnamed). Worth noting these are exactly our scenes 016/040- adjacent material and the seed of the scene-182 Ninth Step payoff.
  • Max's revised Kate Gompert reading (~min 36-38): he no longer thinks Wallace went to Harvard Health Services in genuine suicidal crisis; he now thinks Wallace — like Kate Gompert, presented as fluent in every detail of how mental-health facilities operate — knew the drill and said the words that trigger the protocol, partly to escape finding himself, for once in his life, not the smartest person in the room. An explicit Gompert-as-self-portrait claim from the biographer, going beyond the book.
  • Granada House material (~min 39-50): Deb Larson the director; the image of seven moons in orbit around a dead planet (as-aired); the security-guard/Lotus and Mt. Auburn club towel-boy jobs (with Max's catch that the baton-twirling guard detail was back-loaded from an uncollected Amherst-era story, i.e. Wallace fictionalized his own letters); Big Craig = Gately's model, confirmed by photo — the no-right-angles build and the Prince Valiant haircut are real, and Granada House really ran fishing charters; the elevator-doors-on-the-head party trick is Big Craig's; "House of the Dead" / Dostoevsky-reprieve letter framing the halfway house as literary opportunity; the crocodiles' teaching relayed as-aired: belief is beside the point next to getting down on the knees and asking.
  • Biography-as-form exchange (~min 50-62): Eagleton's two paradoxes; Max embraces the biological frame (first heartbeat to last); the Franzen wiper-fluid anecdote defended as criticism-grade detail (the maximalist who wants to see everything); the lost-first-bicycle joke against Chandler; email killed the great letters — Max relays an unpublished notebook line to the effect that our technology deserves the scrutiny we reserve for our people (~min 62; notebook wording via tape, unverifiable here) and says Wallace didn't much like the internet.
  • Avril material (~min 65-68): Wood presses on the mother-blame thread in therapy; Max says Wallace's mother stopped speaking to him for a period after reading IJ, and that Wallace himself later felt the Avril figure had been overdone — Max believes a later Wallace would have rewritten her; Wood hears in IJ a young man's anger at his mother suffusing the book.
  • The two-Davids thesis (~min 72-76): IJ as a deeply weird novel, not a clean turn to realism — the Gately half humanistic/realist (Max's own scare quotes flagged as-aired), the Incandenza/E.T.A. half still in the Broom pop-playful mode; Max says much of the book was literally written separately and that the collision's accidental quality is a source of the novel's strength; a book that stayed entirely with Don Gately was within Wallace's power, he adds. Wood meanwhile floats that the standard post-irony narrative expires at Brief Interviews and confesses the phrase ironizing-irony eludes him.
  • Reading diet (~min 78-81): what Mattered with the capital M was a parochial set of white-male academic novelists — Vollmann, Franzen, Powers, Pynchon, DeLillo, Moody, Eugenides; lots of sci-fi sediment in IJ; the criticism is the least illuminating part of his output; the room they were sitting in — academia — named as the audience he cared about.
  • Pale King / suicide thesis (~min 85-92): between the New Yorker piece and the book Max's belief grew stronger that Wallace's suicide was in effect a consequence of the unfinishable novel — the Nardil withdrawal was driven almost entirely by the desire to finish, with the physical-side-effects rationale as cover; IJ on this account a happy weird accident he couldn't repeat; Wallace never developed a craftsman's discipline (all inspiration, per Max — with Costello's recollection that Wallace could not write while feeling his own seat in the chair); the late-80s Nardil withdrawal + ECT + restabilization a dress-rehearsal for 2008, motivated by wanting top marks in his alcohol program (~min 110).
  • Boredom genealogy (~min 93-96): asked when boredom became a subject, Max roots it in IJ itself — Lyle, and the no-relation John Wayne whose gift is being unaware of his own playing — and ultimately in the anxiety attacks: self-consciousness as the lifelong enemy, mindfulness/boredom as the countermove. Pale King read as a DeLillo paean — the writer who sits in a colorless room and produces color (~min 92).
  • Against St. Dave (~min 96-99): Max resists the too-good-for-this-world image — the practical Wallace left the Buddhist retreat over food/smoking; his never-admit-buying-an-author's-book-used counsel; Buddhism on Max's telling precisely the wrong religion for him (Wood: staying at the retreat would have meant the cessation of fiction).
  • Closing (~min 112-117): against the not-life-affirming charge, Max answers, as-aired, that writing was always Wallace's means of chasing despair off; the depressive episodes are the kicking-off point for every word; "The Planet Trillaphon" as the origin text; Good Old Neon ends "Not another word." (published Oblivion wording, verified against the held text) — but with a footnote, so, as Max points out, another word always follows.

Themes

depression-anhedonia (Gompert as self-portrait; despair as engine); addiction-recovery (Granada House, the crocodiles, A+ sobriety); family-hamlet (Avril and the mother); irony-sincerity (two-Davids, post-irony skepticism); the-body-tennis / entertainment-self (boredom, Lyle, John Wayne).

Cross-references

Advances