Consider David Foster Wallace: Critical Essays

The proceedings of the first international academic conference devoted solely to Wallace (University of Liverpool, 29-30 July 2009), and the first critical anthology on his work. Eighteen contributions; this note treats the seven that substantially read Infinite Jest in full and one-lines the rest, which read the earlier fiction, the stories, and the nonfiction.

Page cites are the book's printed pages (offset from our archived scan: printed page = PDF page − 2). Infinite Jest citations are Wallace's own page numbers as each essay gives them.

TL;DR

The book that its editor calls the commencement of what he supposes we should call Wallace Studies. Its single most consequential piece is Adam Kelly's "David Foster Wallace and the New Sincerity in American Fiction" (pp.131-146) — the founding statement of the whole New Sincerity reading, and a text far more precise than its reputation: Kelly does not argue "sincerity over irony." He argues that Wallace's fiction is structured by the writer's anticipation of how the reader will receive it, so that sincerity acquires the paradoxical form of Derrida's gift (a thing destroyed the moment it is calculated or named), can never be told apart from manipulation, and can only be attested by the reader's own answering response — never proven. Alongside Kelly, the volume is strong on IJ's structure: David Hering reads the novel as a lopsided Sierpinski gasket of nested triangles and telling absences (with the Cambridge street-chase of Poor Tony and Randy Lenz as a miniature of the whole); Kiki Benzon reads its chaos-theory recursions as a radical realism; Matt Tresco reads Hal's opening breakdown and the endnotes as a fiction of "autism" (communicative difficulty and an anti-encyclopedia). Gregory Phipps gives the fullest early reading of John (N.R.) Wayne; Christopher Thomas ties IJ to Sterne's Tristram Shandy through the shared Yorick / "infinite jest" root; and Graham Foster reads the Great Concavity as a man-made wilderness. A period document (2010, before the #MeToo reappraisal and Kelly's own later neoliberal reframing) whose lasting value is Kelly's essay and the cluster of structural readings.

Key claims

• Kelly, the New Sincerity (pp.131-146). The widespread sense that Wallace affirmed and embodied sincerity needs a theory, and it is not a return to older sincerity. Following Lionel Trilling's Sincerity and Authenticity (1972), Kelly places sincerity — “a congruence of avowal and actual feeling” — in a long decline: superseded first by modernist authenticity (truth to the self as an end), then by the irony of poststructuralism and postmodernism (pp.132-135). Wallace's move is to write fiction structured by the anticipation of the reader's reception — the paranoid, recursive logic of a culture saturated by advertising, “a discourse that reads itself and tries to anticipate and direct its own reception” (p.138).
• Derrida, not Wittgenstein, is Kelly's key (pp.136-146). Kelly states it outright: although Wallace is usually aligned with Wittgenstein, “what connects him to Derrida” is a shared response to narcissism and communicative uncertainty (p.136); Wallace, he notes, credited Derrida with having “successfully debunked the idea that speech is language’s primary instantiation” (p.137). He pairs the two on the gift, the secret, and forgiveness: a true gift is destroyed by calculation yet inseparable from it, so sincerity has the same structure as the gift — it can always be taken for manipulation, and that risk is fundamental (p.139). Hence sincerity must involve “intent” but cannot involve “motive” — a distinction Kelly says is drawn from Infinite Jest (p.140): the film empties viewers' eyes of intent (508), Orin's seductions are sincerity with a motive (1048), the AA Crocodiles fear sincerity with an ulterior motive (369).
• Sincerity is dialogic; only the reader can complete it (pp.140-146). Because all telling can be understood as a pose, sincerity can only be evoked through attestation, not description: Madame Psychosis's voice resists all positive description and needs Mario's uncynical response to register (184-191); “Octet”'s “So decide” (136) can be answered only by the actual reader. Kelly reads AA's un-figure-out-able secrecy and “Blind Faith” (349-351) as the same structure, and closes on Wallace's influence (Powers, Chabon, Ferris, Kunkel, Eggers) — the fiction of the New Sincerity.
• Hering, Sierpinski structure (pp.89-100). Taking Wallace's own 1996 Bookworm remark that IJ is “structured like something called a Sierpinski Gasket”, Hering reads the novel as nested triangles defined as much by absence as presence (the elided JOI-death and head-digging incidents; characters introduced by clothing or disembodied voice before name). Triangular shapes recur literally (the CITGO sign as a triangular star to steer by, 476; young JOI as a side of a right dihedral triangle, 495; annular fusion's pseudocartographic right triangle, 571) and the Cambridge street-chase of Poor Tony Krause and Randy Lenz (689-728, revealed 845) is mapped onto real Cambridge geography as a miniature of the whole novel's fractal schema.
• Benzon, chaos as realism (pp.101-112). IJ's unwieldy, quasi-cyclical structures are not distortions but a mimesis of a genuinely chaotic late-capitalist reality — a radical realism. Tennis (order vs. flux), annulation (a fusion that feeds on poisons, 572), the film's recursive Oedipal loop, and the endnotes are all figures of the novel's porousness of certain borders; Wallace, she argues, positions characters within systems rather than portraying them as systems.
• Tresco, encyclopedism and "autism" (pp.113-122). Hal's eidetic, OED-reciting mind and IJ's fragmentary structure make “autism” a model for communicative difficulty, not self-absorption: the opening “I am in here” (3, 13) and admissions-interview breakdown are eloquence heard as subanimalistic noise. Endnote 110 (the 18-page phone call, 1005-1021) and endnote 114 (which hides that Year of Glad is the last year of Subsidized Time, 1022) show information with no ordering hierarchy, so the novel behaves like an anti-encyclopedia — Wikipedia and Borges's Funes rather than the arboreal tree.
• Phipps, John Wayne (pp.75-88). Wayne is Canada's blank, machinic figurehead and the “ideal athlete” denied the sentimental American overcoming-narrative. Phipps lays out Wayne's tangled links to the Quebecois terrorists (the drowned Bernard Wayne; Wayne's affair with Avril; the Avril / Luria Perec near-anagram) and asks whether Wayne is the terrorists' insider planted inside Enfield — the connections stay elusive and ambivalent. Wayne's drugged WETA meltdown (1072-1074) is read against James Incandenza's microwave suicide as two explosions of interiority; Hal's two-heads-one-world reply to Schtitt (461) is the measured answer to solipsism that Wayne's mere negation is not.
• Thomas, IJ and Sterne (pp.123-130). Beyond the standard Pynchon/DeLillo genealogy, IJ shares deep formal DNA with Tristram Shandy — both keyed to Hamlet's Yorick, “a Fellow of infinite Jest,” and to patrimony and patricide. The ETA custodians Kenkle and Brandt (873-875) are a direct Sternean set-piece: Kenkle as the Tristram-narrator, Brandt as the addressed-but-mute reader.
• Foster, the man-made wilderness (pp.37-48). From Broom's Great Ohio Desert to IJ's Great Concavity, Wallace inverts the American pastoral: the wilderness is not escape but the culture's own toxic product, lush then barren several times a day (573-574). Foster offers a reading of why Hal and Gately dig up JOI's head — to obtain the head-implanted equipment or the master cartridge.
• Framing (Preface, pp.9-11; Introduction, pp.12-24). Hering positions the book against the field's fixation on the irony/postmodernism/post-postmodern question, aiming for “hitherto unmapped regions.” Carlisle's introduction is a personal advocacy of Wallace's reader-directed ethic, built on the 1993 McCaffery interview.

Theories & evidence

THEORY: Wallace's "New Sincerity" is fiction structured by the anticipation of the reader's reception, giving sincerity the paradoxical form of Derrida's gift — undecidable from manipulation, provable only by the reader's answering attestation

• Crux: sincerity-definition
• Stance: advances
• Evidence:
  • [secondary] Trilling's Sincerity and Authenticity: sincerity (“a congruence of avowal and actual feeling”) declines into modernist authenticity, then irony; Kelly extends the arc past Trilling's 1972 endpoint [Kelly pp.132-135]
  • [inference] the load-bearing redefinition: Wallace's fiction asks what happens when the anticipation of others' reception begins to take priority for the acting self, so inner states become effects of that anticipatory logic [Kelly p.136]
  • [secondary] Derrida on the gift and the secret (Given Time, The Gift of Death): the gift is destroyed by calculation yet inseparable from it, so sincerity has the same structure as the gift and must involve “intent” but cannot involve “motive” [Kelly pp.139-140]
  • [text] the intent/motive distinction is drawn from Infinite Jest: the film empties eyes of intent (508); Orin's sincerity with a motive (1048); the AA Crocodiles' fear of sincerity with an ulterior motive (369) [Kelly p.140]
  • [text] sincerity as attested not described: Madame Psychosis's positively-indescribable voice, registered only through Mario's uncynical response (184-191); “Octet”'s “So decide” (136), answerable only by the actual reader; AA's un-figure-out-able secrecy and “Blind Faith” (349-351) [Kelly pp.141-144]
  • [author] Wallace's own statements enlisted: the writer must gauge what will “sound true”; a certain blend of sincerity and manipulation (to Lipsky); Derrida “successfully debunked the idea that speech is language’s primary instantiation” [Kelly pp.135-139]
• Notes: Kelly foregrounds the tension the reading lives on — if a writer must anticipate reception and communicate what sounds true rather than simply what is true, then is he being fully sincere, or is there a manipulative quality that counteracts his good intentions (p.135); and the undecidability is structural, so even the writer will never know whether true sincerity has been attained, and the reader will not either (p.140). He also flags that AA's secrecy “accounts for its structural similarity to Fascism” (p.143) and, in a footnote, that “New Sincerity” was used earlier by Jim Collins (1993) for a different, authenticity-seeking film genre he explicitly distinguishes from his own (p.136). This is the primary text behind the whole later New Sincerity debate.

THEORY: Infinite Jest is built as a (lopsided) Sierpinski gasket — nested triangles whose defining absences drive reader inference, with the Cambridge street-chase as a miniature of the whole

• Crux: sierpinski-structure
• Stance: advances
• Evidence:
  • [author] Wallace to Silverblatt, Bookworm 1996: IJ is “structured like something called a Sierpinski Gasket (...) it went through some I think “mercy cuts,” so it’s probably kind of a lopsided Sierpinski Gasket now” [quoted by Hering, p.89]
  • [secondary] Carlisle's Elegant Complexity: the 28-chapter pattern grows from 15 chapters in 179 pages to 1 chapter in 173 pages; the gasket is built by cutting smaller triangle-sized holes out of larger triangles [Hering pp.90-91]
  • [text] triangles literal and figurative: the CITGO “triangular star to steer by” (476); young JOI as a side of a “right dihedral triangle” (495); annular fusion's “massive pseudocartographic right triangle” (571-572); Star Drills and Mario's police-lock stance [Hering pp.91-93]
  • [text] the Poor Tony / Randy Lenz street-chase (Cambridge, 689-728, converging at the Antitoi shop, revealed 845) mapped onto real streets as nested triangles whose apex is Inman Square, with the shop at the novel's exact midpoint [Hering pp.95-100]
  • [text] narrative absence as structural: the elided cluster of JOI's death and the head-digging incident (referenced only elliptically, in contradiction) is the gasket's visible absence of another triangle [Hering p.90]
• Notes: Hering flags his final flourish — that the triangle's incenter falls on the Antitoi shop — as “admittedly more speculative... an interesting conjecture nonetheless” (p.99). The head-digging point here is a joi-head adjacency: Hering uses it as an example of narrative absence, not to explain the dig.

THEORY: IJ's chaos-theory recursions (annulation, tennis, the film's loops, the endnotes) are not distortions of reality but a mimesis of it — a "radical realism"

• Crux: annular-structure
• Stance: advances
• Evidence:
  • [text] annulation as a fusion that feeds on poisons (572) that turns wasteland so efficiently it must be re-poisoned (573); the Concavity's feral infants formed by toxicity and sustained by annulation (1056) [Benzon pp.105-106]
  • [text] tennis as an order/flux dialectic — Schtitt's not-order-and-limit sense of beauty (82); Hal's gargantuan-court dream of systems inside systems (67-68) [Benzon pp.103-104]
  • [text] the film “Infinite Jest” as embodied recursion (the revolving door, Death, the apologizing mother, viewers dying in their own excrement); the endnotes as OuLiPo-style Hofstadter Strange Loops [Benzon pp.106-108]
  • [author] Wallace to McCaffery: the wish to do something real American; free play within an ordered system resonates while complete caprice deadens (149-50); I've always thought of myself as a realist (Salon) [Benzon pp.109-111]
  • [secondary] N. Katherine Hayles's recursive feedback loops; LeClair, McHale, Conte, Serres on chaotics and mimesis [Benzon pp.105-112]
• Notes: Benzon fields Wallace's own worry (quoted against the charge) that his fiction risks Pynchon-clone crank-turning (McCaffery), arguing the humanism overrides mere technical performance. Overlaps Hering's structural reading; the film-content material is an entertainment-contents adjacency.

THEORY: Hal's condition and IJ's form dramatize "autism" as communicative difficulty and an anti-encyclopedia, not self-absorption or a clinical diagnosis

• Crux: hal-autism
• Stance: advances
• Evidence:
  • [text] the opening breakdown: “I am in here” (3, 13) and Hal's silent encyclopedic eloquence (12) heard as subanimalistic noise; “autism” becomes a model for communicative difficulty [Tresco pp.116-117]
  • [text] endnote 110 (the ~18-page phone call, 1005-1021) and endnote 114 hiding that Year of Glad is the last year of Subsidized Time (1022) show information with no obvious hierarchy and no map connecting the threads [Tresco pp.117-120]
  • [secondary] Mendelson/Moretti on encyclopedic narrative; Burn on IJ's elusive plot and the mystery of Hal's condition that eludes classification; Deleuze & Guattari's schizoanalysis; Asperger/Bleuler on autism; Borges's Funes; Rain Man [Tresco pp.113-121]
  • [inference] the modern encyclopedia (Wikipedia) as anti-arboreal — the encyclopedia may become the anti-encyclopedia, an infinite procession, like the infinite-ness of Infinite Jest [Tresco pp.121-122]
• Notes: Tresco explicitly flags the risk he is running — distinguishing narrative-“autism” from clinical autism, and warning that autism-as-trope can complement a “corrupt, readymade postmodern theory” (pp.114, 121). This reads what the opening dramatizes (communicative difficulty), makes no claim about a chemical cause, and neither advances nor rejects hal-dmz.

THEORY: John (N.R.) Wayne may be the terrorists' insider planted inside Enfield, but the novel keeps the connection deliberately elusive

• Crux: wayne-afr
• Stance: entertains
• Evidence:
  • [text] Wayne's tangle with the terrorists: the drowned miner's son Bernard Wayne of the wheelchair cult (1058-1060), almost certainly a relative; the terrorists' need of a Canadian instructor and student already inside (726); the Avril / Luria Perec near-anagram (both from L'Islet county) [Phipps pp.83-85]
  • [text] Wayne's affair with Avril — the cheerleader/football-helmet tableau (552-553) crafted with Orin in mind — and Avril's Canadian-pulse enmeshments (92) [Phipps p.84]
  • [text] Wayne as machinic, less alive than undead (263), aimed like a missile at the Show (662); his drugged WETA meltdown holding forth innermost thoughts for public ears (1072-1074) [Phipps pp.76-77, 86-87]
  • [text] the head-digging passage: Hal imagines John N.R. Wayne, who would have won this year's WhataBurger, standing watch in a mask as Gately and Hal dig up JOI's head (16-17) [Phipps p.87]
• Notes: Phipps rejects Stephen Burn's speculation that Bernard Wayne is John Wayne's father (and thus that the terrorists made Wayne watch the cartridge for the sins of his father) because John Wayne's father is still alive (p.84 n.5). He holds the whole cluster elusive and ambivalent and reads Wayne's meltdown as not an argument against solipsism but simply a negation, with Hal's two-heads-one-world (461) as the real counter-position. joi-head and wayne-meltdown sightings ride inside this block.

THEORY: Infinite Jest is formally and thematically continuous with Sterne's Tristram Shandy, joined at the Hamlet/Yorick "infinite jest" root

• Crux: hamlet-frame
• Stance: advances
• Evidence:
  • [text] the shared Yorick — “a Fellow of infinite Jest” (Hamlet) — carries both books' concern with patrimony, heredity, and patricide [Thomas pp.124-125]
  • [text] the ETA custodians Kenkle and Brandt (873-875): Kenkle's Sternean nose-and-Christmas diatribe, the em-dash-after-terminal-punctuation, Brandt as the addressed-but-silent interlocutor = Tristram's reader [Thomas pp.125-129]
  • [text] IJ's quoted-ellipsis “...” dialogue (41) as Wallace testing the limits of language the way Sterne's unpronounceable typography does [Thomas p.126]
  • [secondary] Timothy Jacobs on IJ as a figurative rewriting of The Brothers Karamazov — Thomas pushes the genealogy back past Pynchon/DeLillo to the eighteenth century [Thomas pp.123-124]
• Notes: Thomas concedes the Sterne influence is “still basically conjecture” — Wallace never wrote about or mentioned Sterne, so there is no published acknowledgment of influence (p.124); the Kenkle/Brandt set-piece is offered as the qualitatively different sort of evidence.

THEORY: Hal and Gately dig up JOI's head to recover the head-implanted equipment or the master cartridge

• Crux: joi-head
• Stance: advances
• Evidence:
  • [text] JOI (disguised as Hal's professional conversationalist) reports a gyroscopic balance sensor, a mise-en-scene appropriation card, and an entertainment cartridge implanted in his cerebrum (31) [Foster p.43]
  • [inference] Foster concludes Hal and Gately are seeking equipment to safely view the cartridge, the filmmaking implants, or the cartridge itself [Foster p.43]
• Notes: Foster grants the counter directly — there is some ambiguity in the reason Hal and Gately dig up the head — before drawing the deduction. Cf. Hering's use of the same absence as a structural example (sierpinski-structure block) and Phipps's citation of the WhataBurger/head passage (wayne-afr block).

Themes

Irony and sincerity (Kelly, Carlisle; for the nonfiction, Jenner); the reader and the gift-structure of communication (Kelly, Carlisle); structure, recursion, and the encyclopedic (Hering, Benzon, Tresco); communication and solipsism (Kelly, Tresco, Phipps); addiction and recovery (Kelly on AA, Benzon on annulation-as-relapse); entertainment and the film (Benzon, Foster); Quebecois separatism and national identity (Phipps, Foster); ecology and the Concavity (Foster, Benzon); Wallace's literary genealogy (Thomas); politics and heroism (Jenner on McCain).

Cross-references

• kelly-dialectic-of-sincerity, kelly-new-sincerity-reply, kelly-death-of-the-author — Kelly's later essays; the anthology chapter here is the 2010 original those texts revise, defend, and historicize.
• white-guys-new-sincerity — the critique whose reading of Kelly this original essay lets a reader test directly.
• irony-and-sincerity — Kelly's gift-and-attestation account of how sincerity works in the novel.
• dfw-in-context-cambridge-2022 — the later, larger companion anthology; Hayes-Brady and Hering appear in both, and Baskin's third pole there answers Kelly's New Sincerity here.
• gc-ep012-david-hering-fiction-form, hering-toxic-postmodern-spaces — David Hering's later IJ work extends the structural reading in his chapter.
• burn-ij-readers-guide — the Sierpinski/annular structural claims and Phipps's rejected Bernard-Wayne speculation both engage Burn.

Notable passages

"David Foster Wallace’s fiction, in contrast, asks what happens when the anticipation of others’ reception of one’s outward behavior begins to take priority for the acting self, so that inner states lose their originating causal status and instead become effects of that anticipatory logic." — Kelly (p.135)

"This suggests that sincerity has the same structure as the gift: it can always be taken for manipulation, and this risk is fundamental" — Kelly (p.139)

"It's actually structured like something called a Sierpinski Gasket (...) it went through some I think “mercy cuts,” so it’s probably kind of a lopsided Sierpinski Gasket now." — Wallace to Michael Silverblatt (Bookworm 1996), quoted by Hering (p.89)

"Hal and Don Gately are reported to have entered the Concavity to seek the ultimate piece of contemporary culture, The Entertainment." — Foster (p.43)

"The most obvious similarities between Infinite Jest and Tristram Shandy center around the connections both texts have to Hamlet, specifically the character of Yorick, “a Fellow of infinite Jest”" — Thomas (p.124)