IJ study archive

Crafty David Foster Wallace

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TL;DR

A 2011 Hydra Magazine personal essay by Anelise Chen (a fiction writer, and Max Ross's companion on the same SXSW-week Ransom Center trip) on the ethical unease of showing a dead writer's first drafts to her creative-writing students. Its spine is a superstitious comedy — Chen reads her copy of Infinite Jest falling off a shelf, then a broken projector adapter she barely tried to fix, as David Foster Wallace's ghost forbidding her planned "editing workshop" on the Good Old Neon drafts. Along the way it records concrete craft observations from the drafts (the therapy→ analysis revision, the deliberate digressions and verbal tics, the sad margin notes) and folds in the famous anecdote of the Infinite Jest manuscript landing on DeLillo's porch "like a gunshot." It advances no theory scoped to a novel crux — its argument is about the ethics and mystery of drafts — but it carries a DeLillo-relationship datum and several firsthand observations of how Wallace drafted and revised.

Key claims

  • The framing "sign": on April 15, 2011 (Pale King's release day) Chen's copy of IJ falls off the shelf — "The huge brick of a book was none other than my copy of Infinite Jest" — with DFW's author photo facing up; she reads it, half seriously, as a rebuke.
  • The planned lesson: based on her archive visit she meant to run an "editing workshop" projecting the first handwritten pages of Good Old Neon — "the story about the character who believes himself caught in an endless cycle of fraudulence" — to study Wallace's revisions between first and final drafts.
  • The drafts' craft lessons: the drafts show "how delaying desire is a valuable thing", how replacing "therapy" with "analysis" changes a sentence, and that "his long digressions and overabundant detail weren't a result of lack of discipline" and his verbal tics ("whatever," "and so") "were not accidental or arbitrary" — deliberate design, not sloppiness.
  • The sad marginalia: funny margin notes ("Cheers wasn't ON in 1977! When did Cheers! run?") sit beside anguished ones ("I am so sad"; "Just finish this"); the Oblivion ("Snoring Story") drafts "show him struggling in a very sad way", which satisfied "that voyeuristic desire to delve into the private life of a celebrity" but made her uneasy about exposing him.
  • The ethics question: whether it is right to look at a writer's drafts — it has "an icky rubbernecking feel to it". Chen frames it as a matter of belief: drafts are harmless if art is "a well-constructed vessel" of "sturdy nuts and bolts," but "if you believe that good fiction also comes from a place of fear, vulnerability, insecurity, ugliness, and extreme doubt, then of course looking at drafts is anathema."
  • The DeLillo anecdotes: a footnote reports that "the MS of IJ was so heavy that when it was dropped on DeLillo's front porch it sounded like a gunshot", and an image caption records an "Annotated copy of Don Delillo's Players" among the materials she photographed.
  • The moral, via Wallace's own words: she closes on the wish to honor art that can "[apply] CPR to those elements of what's human and magical that still live and glow despite the times' darkness", concluding she went to the archive not to "steal craft tricks" but "to get to know someone better."

Theories & evidence

THEORY: DeLillo is part of Infinite Jest's genesis — the manuscript went to him, and Wallace annotated his novels

  • Crux: delillo-influence
  • Stance: mentions
  • Evidence:
    • [draft] An image caption records an "Annotated copy of Don Delillo's Players" among the Ransom materials — another marked-up DeLillo novel in Wallace's library. [image caption]
    • [secondary] A footnote passes on the anecdote that the IJ manuscript, when "dropped on DeLillo's front porch," "sounded like a gunshot" — the two writers' mentor/reader relationship in circulation. [¶ footnotes]
  • Notes: A minor, corroborating sighting for the DeLillo thread (sibling to the Ross White Noise underlining, the Phawker Ratner's Star datum, and the Foster IJ-margin-notes report). The porch anecdote is folkloric/[secondary], not archival proof; the annotated Players is a real marginalia sighting. Chen makes no influence argument — the sighting is recorded for completeness.

Themes

The ethics and mystery of drafts (should a reader see the "fear, vulnerability, insecurity" behind finished art?); craft and revision as deliberate design (the digressions and tics as choices, not accidents); voyeurism and the dead author (the "rubbernecking" unease, shared with her travel companion Ross's essay); grief and superstition (the ghost of DFW forbidding the lesson); and Wallace's own redemptive-sincerity aesthetic (the "CPR to those elements of what's human and magical" credo).

Cross-references

Notable passages

  • The sign: "The huge brick of a book was none other than my copy of Infinite Jest".
  • On Good Old Neon: "the story about the character who believes himself caught in an endless cycle of fraudulence".
  • On craft: the drafts show "how delaying desire is a valuable thing", and that "his long digressions and overabundant detail weren't a result of lack of discipline".
  • On the sad drafts: the Oblivion pages "show him struggling in a very sad way", satisfying "that voyeuristic desire to delve into the private life of a celebrity".
  • The ethics: "good fiction also comes from a place of fear, vulnerability, insecurity, ugliness, and extreme doubt".
  • Wallace's credo, as she quotes it: "[apply] CPR to those elements of what's human and magical that still live and glow despite the times' darkness".
  • The DeLillo anecdote: "the MS of IJ was so heavy that when it was dropped on DeLillo's front porch it sounded like a gunshot".
  • The sister's verdict: "If thunder strikes you down then you'll know it's a sign".

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