David Foster Wallace: Fiction and Form

Bloomsbury Academic, 2016. A single-author monograph built on two research visits to the Harry Ransom Center, where Hering read all the archival manuscripts and letters for Wallace’s fiction. Four long chapters track one formal motif each across the whole career — Vocality (ghosts and the narrating voice), Spatiality (region and institutions), Visuality (mirrors, screens and reflection) and Finality (the unfinished Pale King). Infinite Jest is read deepest in the ghost chapter (the wraith) and appears substantially in the spatiality and visuality chapters (institutions and the Concavity; the filmography). This note treats the IJ material in full and the framing argument insofar as it drives that reading; the Broom / Girl / Brief Interviews / Oblivion / Pale King passages are summarized where they bear on IJ.

This electronic edition carries no print pagination; citations below are by chapter and section with a locating phrase. IJ page numbers, where given, are Hering’s own citations to the 1996 novel, reproduced as written.

TL;DR

The closest published thing to sitting in the Ransom Center reading room: a genetic-criticism monograph that reads Wallace’s fiction against its own draft record. Its master argument is that Wallace’s career oscillates between "monologic" and "dialogic" narration, and that his recurring ghost figures dramatize an anxiety over authorial presence — the fear, inherited from Barthes' "death of the author," that a novelist can neither disappear from nor honestly inhabit his own text. For Infinite Jest the payoff is a sustained reading of James Incandenza’s wraith as a "companion ghost": not a plot curiosity but the point where Wallace’s whole preoccupation with possession, inheritance and authorship concretizes into a literal supernatural presence who converses with a living mind. Hering also gives the novel’s institutions (ETA, Ennet House, AA) a spatial theory, endorses the Sierpinski-Gasket account of its structure, and reads the Incandenza filmography as a coded record of a father’s failed attempts to communicate. Because Hering worked directly from the drafts, the book is also a primary source on IJ’s composition: the two early drafts in which characters are named "David," the abandoned two-part structure, and his own firsthand estimate of how much was actually cut.

Key claims

• The wraith is the culmination of a career-long "ghost" motif. Across Wallace’s fiction an "absent possessor" (Broom’s Gramma, controlling events from a hiding place) develops, by way of the metafictional voice-amalgam at the end of "Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way", into what Hering names the "companion ghost": a dead figure who manifests directly to a living listener and enters into something like empathetic conversation. James Incandenza’s wraith is the first full instance; Neal in "Good Old Neon" is the next. (Ch. 1, "Companion Ghosts.")

• The wraith-Gately scene stages Wallace’s move from monologic to dialogic narration. The wraith speaks through Gately’s own "brain-voice," implanting words that are not in Gately’s vocabulary, producing a register "virtually impossible to disentangle" — Brian Richardson’s "permeable narrator." Hering reads this as Wallace critiquing his own monologic tendency from inside a dialogic frame: a "failed artist" (JOI) whose gestures toward polyphony are chastised by the character he possesses. (Ch. 1, "The Dialogism (or Otherwise) of Possession".)

• Hering resists collapsing the wraith into Wallace. Against Tom LeClair (the wraith "as Wallace") and Marshall Boswell (who reads the wraith "as Wallace"), Hering reads it as "a ‘flickering’ amalgamation of author figures" — a trace of authorial presence, not the author himself, and one whose sentiments are partly those of the irony-bound contemporaries Wallace criticized in "E Unibus Pluram." (Ch. 1.)

• Whether the wraith mediates the entire novel is left genuinely open. Hering reports Timothy Jacobs’s stronger claim — that the wraith is "the text’s mediator," felt from the first page, so that "I am in here" is the wraith possessing the whole narrative — and treats it as serious but unresolved, noting its monologic risk (a governing consciousness that attenuates the novel’s many voices). (Ch. 1.)

• The second (Lyle) wraith is one of the book’s admitted mysteries. The brief appearance of a second wraith — apparently the still-living ETA guru Lyle — "invasively licking sweat off Gately’s forehead" suggests the living can reach an insubstantial state; a deleted draft sequence had this second wraith appear in Gately’s memory of his mother’s kitchen. Hering speculates it may prefigure Lyle’s death in the coming attack on ETA. (Ch. 1, note.)

• IJ’s structure is a "connectedness" the reader must reconstruct. Hering endorses the account (Michael Silverblatt’s "fractal", clarified by Wallace as a "lopsided" Sierpinski Gasket) of the novel as a web of recursive relations, and argues that the reader’s linear reassembly of its scattered parts is itself the "huge circle" of communication the novel dramatizes — egress found by retreating further into institutional form, not out of it. (Ch. 2, "Retreating Inside.")

• The institutions are spatial engines. ETA, Ennet House and AA physically shape behavior and even the body (Ennet House "resembles seven moons orbiting a dead planet"; ETA’s four "inward-facing" buildings; AA’s "traditional huge circle"). Hering reads the novel’s redemptive circle as a reworking of the imprisoning circle — the "vicious cycle" reappropriated into "sharing and communion" — Gately as the exemplar of freedom-through-submission. He resists Mark McGurl’s reading of this as simple political conservatism. (Ch. 2.)

• The Great Concavity is a degraded pastoral. Annular fusion transfigures the fertile Midwestern cornfield of "Westward" into a toxic cycle that runs "overgrown to wasteland to overgrown several times a month", and unlike Broom’s sealed Great Ohio Desert it encroaches on what surrounds it, forcing the retreat indoors. (Ch. 2.)

• The Incandenza filmography is a coded record of failed fatherly communication. Films like "As of Yore," "Valuable Coupon Has Been Removed" and "It Was a Great Marvel that He Was in the Father Without Knowing Him" are dramatizations of real events in JOI’s life, detectable only to those who know it — cries for intergenerational contact that the compiling critics miss. The lethal "Infinite Jest (VI)" is the tragic endpoint of that desperation, and Wallace nests it inside his own, more communicative, novel of the same title. (Ch. 3, "the work of cinematic auteur James O. Incandenza.")

• Clenette’s monologue began as a standalone 1988 story, "Las Meninas." Hering firsthand-dates it to a December 1988 letter to Bonnie Nadell enclosing "Las Meninas," a "2-page story" that "would later appear in Infinite Jest as Clenette’s monologue" — one of the earliest pieces of IJ writing, and the only case where Wallace folds a discrete story into the novel. (Ch. 3.)

• Composition (firsthand from the drafts). Two drafts name a character "David": the earliest professional-conversationalist scene (Hal is "David," the scene dated 1986), and a later draft where the future Marlon Bain is called "David Foster Wallace." IJ was originally planned in two parts, like Broom, before Wallace abandoned the division for whole-body "connectedness." And, against Wallace’s own tour-era figures, Hering’s read of the surviving archive puts the actual cut "in the region of 150 pages."

Theories & evidence

THEORY: James Incandenza’s wraith is a "companion ghost" — the return of a dead father who manifests to a living listener and converses, dramatizing Wallace’s anxiety over authorial presence

• Crux: ghost-voice-possession
• Stance: advances
• Evidence:
  • [text] The wraith speaks through Gately’s own "brain-voice," implanting words not in his vocabulary, so the register is "virtually impossible to disentangle" — Richardson’s "permeable narrator." (Ch. 1, wraith-Gately interface; IJ 831.)
  • [text] The motif is seeded earlier: JOI’s father’s "a machine in the ghost" (IJ 160); the Aht dictum "The Sated ghost cannot see secret things" (IJ 243–4); Lucien Antitoi who "sheds his body’s suit" and is "catapulted home" (IJ 488–9). (Ch. 1.)
  • [inference] The wraith is the concretization of the "absent possessor" that runs from Broom’s Gramma through the amalgamated voices of "Westward" — but "more benevolent," desiring interaction rather than remote orchestration. (Ch. 1.)
• Notes: This is the book’s central IJ claim and its first chapter’s spine. Counter-tension Hering himself raises: Gately’s own initial confusion over "whether the wraith represents God or his disease" (IJ 833), and the wraith’s intrusion as an act of "lexical rape" (IJ 832) — the dialogue is real but not an "equilateral power relationship."

THEORY: The wraith may be the mediating consciousness of the entire narrative — "I am in here" is the wraith possessing the whole book

• Crux: ij-narrator
• Stance: complicates
• Evidence:
  • [secondary] Timothy Jacobs: the wraith is "the text’s mediator, the centering and orienting presence that organises the entire narrative structure," felt from the first page; "All is mediated, the polyphonic voices collated, by the wraith" (Ch. 1, quoting Jacobs, Eschatological).
  • [secondary] Tom LeClair aligns the living JOI with Pynchon but the wraith with the author; Boswell reads "the wraith as Wallace." (Ch. 1.)
  • [inference] Hering’s own reading: the wraith is "a ‘flickering’ amalgamation of author figures", a trace of authorial presence — NOT literally Wallace, disagreeing with LeClair’s alignment (as Jacobs also does). (Ch. 1, note.)
• Notes: Hering does not settle whether the wraith governs the whole text; he grants the reading force while flagging its cost. In-source counterweight he raises: Jacobs himself concedes that "to posit a governing consciousness risks the attenuation of the [work’s] many individual voices" (the monologic danger of the very reading advanced). Bears on the joi-narrator / film-camera-narrator variants.

THEORY: The wraith is a literal supernatural revenant — real and object-capable, not Gately’s fever

• Crux: wraith-reality
• Stance: endorses
• Evidence:
  • [text] Hering names it "The principal supernatural event in Infinite Jest", treats JOI’s escape from the "brass casket" via the "annual hyperfloration cycles" (IJ 65) and Antitoi’s soul-flight (IJ 488–9) as literally enacted plot mechanics. (Ch. 1.)
  • [text] The wraith "permeates the barriers of consciousness," moving at "the speed of quanta" (IJ 831) and appearing "to literally feel Gately’s pain" (IJ 839). (Ch. 1.)
  • [text] Object-capable second wraith: the Lyle-wraith "invasively licking sweat off Gately’s forehead" (IJ 933). (Ch. 1.)
• Notes: Hering takes the wraith’s reality as a working premise rather than arguing it explicitly — the interpretive weight is on what the ghost does, not whether it is "real." Counterweight in the same passage: Gately’s God-vs-disease uncertainty (IJ 833). Convergent with the archive’s literal-wraith reading; does not adjudicate against the hallucination reading, simply does not entertain it.

THEORY: The second wraith (apparently the still-living Lyle) shows the living can reach an insubstantial state

• Crux: lyle-wraith
• Stance: entertains
• Evidence:
  • [text] The Lyle-wraith’s brief appearance (IJ 933) is "one of the novel’s prevailing mysteries," seeming to suggest "it is possible for the living to move to a more insubstantial state." (Ch. 1, note.)
  • [draft] A deleted draft sequence has "the second wraith appears in Gately’s memory of his mother’s kitchen" (Box 15.5), which "seems to indicate that wraiths may also be able to invade memories." (Ch. 1, note.)
  • [inference] "More speculatively, it could prefigure Lyle’s death in the imminent terrorist attack on ETA." (Ch. 1, note.)
• Notes: Explicitly flagged by Hering as speculative and mysterious. Relevant to lyle-nature / lyle-wraith; the deleted kitchen sequence survives only in the draft record.

THEORY: IJ’s macro-form is a Sierpinski-Gasket "connectedness" that the reader reconstructs

• Crux: annular-structure
• Stance: endorses
• Evidence:
  • [author] The structure was "identified as ‘fractal’ by Michael Silverblatt and clarified by Wallace as resembling a ‘lopsided’ triangular-shaped fractal called a Sierpinski Gasket" (Wallace’s 1996 Bookworm interview). (Ch. 2.)
  • [draft] A marginal listing in a draft lists sequences ("main body of Lenz-dog and Gately fight, with worked-in inserts of dialogues, Mario and Madame, Gately & Joelle on UHID, Orin & Slansker, Slansker CV") followed by "This needs to be broken up" (Box 16.6) — Hering’s evidence for the associative, deliberately-fragmented method. (Ch. 2.)
  • [secondary] Cross-referenced to his own earlier essay "Infinite Jest: Triangles, Cycles, Choices and Chases", and to Carlisle and McGurl on the Gasket. (Ch. 2, note.)
• Notes: Hering’s twist is functional: the reader’s "linear rearrangement" of the parts is the redemptive circle of communication, egress found by going further into form. The "lopsided" quality he ties to the material that was cut before publication. Reuses annular-structure (sub-tag sierpinski-structure).

THEORY: The Incandenza filmography encodes a father’s failed attempts to communicate; "Infinite Jest (VI)" is the tragic endpoint of the art/entertainment continuum

• Crux: filmography-coded-message
• Stance: advances
• Evidence:
  • [text] "As of Yore" and "Valuable Coupon Has Been Removed" dramatize the events of IJ 157–69 and 491–503; "It Was a Great Marvel that He Was in the Father Without Knowing Him" refers to JOI and Hal at IJ 27–31 — legible only to those who know his life, "which pointedly does not include the critics who compiled the filmography". (Ch. 3.)
  • [text] Hal’s narration defends the films against the hostility charge, citing "the incredible pathos of Paul Anthony Heaven reading his lecture... all the time weeping" (IJ 911); Joelle recognizes "flashes of something else... where he dropped the technical fireworks and tried to make characters move" (IJ 740–1). (Ch. 3.)
  • [inference] The lethal film and the novel share the title deliberately: Wallace "encloses the lethally entertaining film within his own, more deliberately communicative, narrative" via mise-en-abyme. (Ch. 3.)
• Notes: Hering only "partly concurs" with Boswell (filmography "reads like an extended parody of the postmodern canon"; JOI "remains hidden behind its mirrors"), arguing the auteur — and Wallace — "displays his authorial presence more nakedly than might at first be apparent." Bears on entertainment-purpose and filmography-coded-message.

Themes

Communication and solipsism (the monologic/dialogic master frame; the wraith as permeable narrator; authorial presence and the "death of the author"); entertainment and the self (the art/entertainment continuum; the filmography; "Infinite Jest (VI)" as failed communication rather than pure weapon); family and the Hamlet frame (the dead father who returns to possess his descendants; JOI’s films as coded fatherly address); addiction and recovery (AA’s circle as the redemptive rework of the vicious cycle; freedom through institutional submission); structure (the Sierpinski Gasket; reader-reconstruction as the novel’s communicative loop); ecology and the Concavity (annular fusion as degraded pastoral); composition and the archive (genetic criticism; the draft record as "another text in itself").

Cross-references

• gc-ep012-david-hering-fiction-form — the Great Concavity podcast recorded five months before this book shipped; Hering previews these chapters there and gives the firsthand composition testimony (no-missing-year-drafts, the 1986 conversationalist date, late Orin) that the book grounds in citable form. The podcast is the fuller source on the ending / missing-year question, which this book barely touches; the book is the authority on the wraith-as-narrative-device reading.
• hering-toxic-postmodern-spaces — Hering’s 2011 essay on IJ’s toxic postmodern spaces; the spatiality chapter here is the monograph-scale companion to it (Concavity, institutions, annular fusion).
• moore-first-draft-ij and debraski-ij-cuts — the other draft-record sources; Hering read the same 1993 material Moore collated and the later Ransom Center strata, and his cut estimate and name-change confirmations sit directly alongside theirs.
• dfw-in-context-cambridge-2022 — Redgate’s Ringwraith reading and Boswell’s Nabokovian wraith-as-author reading are the near-contemporary counterpoints to Hering’s companion-ghost reading; all three treat the wraith as the novel’s key to authorial presence.
• burn-ij-readers-guide — Burn is Hering’s most-cited interlocutor on IJ (the "machine in the ghost" materialism, Flatland pedagogy, the Sierpinski Gasket, the parallel-compositions argument about the post-1996 work).
• the ending — the wraith-as-whole-narrative-mediator question feeds the debate over who narrates the novel.

Notable passages

The principal supernatural event in Infinite Jest, the appearance of the 'wraith' of Dr James Incandenza to Don Gately, takes place towards the end of the novel, but is foreshadowed in a number of earlier scenes. (Ch. 1)

The wraith converses with Gately through his own 'brain-voice' (831), implanting thoughts into Gately’s own consciousness, including words that are not in his vocabulary but which nevertheless appear as part of his own thought process. This results in a narrative register that is virtually impossible to disentangle. (Ch. 1)

All is mediated, the polyphonic voices collated, by the wraith […] the narrative is dialogic, yet also complexly monologic in the sense that the wraith assembles the many voices through his own voice. — Jacobs, quoted by Hering (Ch. 1)

Two Davids appear in the drafts of Infinite Jest, and both are subsequently erased. In the first iteration of the 'professional conversationalist' scene, which appears to date from 1986 and has the title 'What are you exactly – unadorned autobio – automabiography', Hal is called David. The scene is set in 1974 and 'David' is 13: Wallace would have been 12 (Box 15.6). In a subsequent draft the character later named as Marlon Bain is called David Foster Wallace (Box 16.5). (Ch. 1)

Infinite Jest, which in manuscript form was originally divided into two parts in a similar fashion to The Broom of the System, partially achieves this through enacting a narrative structure identified as 'fractal' by Michael Silverblatt and clarified by Wallace as resembling a 'lopsided' triangular- shaped fractal called a Sierpinski Gasket. (Ch. 2)

Based on the material currently in the archive, the amount removed seems to be in the region of 150 pages. (Ch. 2, note 26)

I, largely unaided, cut 310 pages from the fucker over the winter (it is, still, pretty long), and now even as it’s at the copyeditor they say they’d like another 100 or so cut. — Wallace to Don DeLillo, May 1995, quoted by Hering (Ch. 2, note 26)