The Consciousness of David Foster Wallace's Oblivion

TL;DR

A personal appreciation-essay (blog, 2011) whose stated subject is Oblivion but which opens with a substantial reading of Infinite Jest — the part that bears directly on the novel. Ismail's throughline is Wallace as the writer who best renders the crippled inner voice: he reads Hal's opening interview as the paradigm of "the inability to communicate," praises the Erdedy section as a portrait of self-aware addiction, and frames the whole late oeuvre (IJ → Oblivion → the Kenyon address → The Pale King) as one continuous attempt to relieve the loneliness that solipsism produces.

Key claims

• Conversion via the opening. Ismail admits he bought Infinite Jest mainly "so I could glibly dismiss it", then "the magic happened." Hal's opening plea to be recognized as "in there" — quoted at length ("I feel and believe. I have opinions… I believe the influence of Kierkegaard on Camus is underestimated…") against the "Subanimalistic noises and sounds" others hear — dramatizes what Ismail calls "one of the most basic human failings: the inability to communicate, to express that which lies too deep to be simplified into words".
• Self-aware addiction. The Erdedy waiting-for-marijuana section (which "sold" him on Wallace) throws the reader "inside the head of this man who is an addict, who is aware of being an addict and who is aware that he is aware" — a recursive self-consciousness Ismail names "this almost crippling self-consciousness".
• Emulation, not stream-of-consciousness. Wallace, he argues, does not mimic thought (as Joyce's Molly does, rendered "verbatim") but emulates it, so that "you feel yourself reading the same way that you think"; "there has never been an author that so successfully describes the inner voice."
• The Salon interview as key. He credits Laura Miller's Salon interview — where Wallace says "the intellectualization and aestheticizing of principles and values in this country is one of the things that's gutted our generation" and offers loneliness (not morality) as the reason not to lie — with sending him to Oblivion.
• Oblivion, defended against its reviews. He surveys the cold reception (Kirn, Wood, Kakutani, quoted) and defends the collection for "the vulnerability beneath the sheen." Good Old Neon is "the standout" — the fraudulence-paradox monologue ("My whole life I've been a fraud") is one of those pieces that dress "something that you have always known to be true but have never been able to articulate"; the moments Wallace wanted to "make us feel less alone". He reads Incarnations of Burned Children and The Suffering Channel (the 9/11 "ten weeks to live" beat) as emotionally direct, and hears Mister Squishy's spider-man and the Suffering Channel's WTC setting as the same premonition of something "about to engulf these people."
• The oeuvre as one project. The Pale King, from the excerpts, seems "more an attempt at finding a solution to the solitude and loneliness described in Infinite Jest, defined in his essay E Unibus Pluram and explored to its depths in Oblivion" — continuous with the Kenyon address's ethic of chosen attention ("what to worship").

Theories & evidence

THEORY: Infinite Jest's opening dramatizes the core human failure at the heart of Wallace's work — the gulf between a rich interior and the "subanimalistic" noise others receive, i.e. the inability to communicate

• Crux: communication-solipsism
• Stance: endorses
• Evidence:
  • [text] Hal's opening interview, quoted by Ismail: "I feel and believe. I have opinions… I could interface you guys right under the table… I'm not just a creatus," heard only as "Subanimalistic noises and sounds"; "I am not what you see and hear." [scene 003, pp. 11-17]
  • [secondary] Ismail's gloss: this discrepancy "is one of the most basic human failings: the inability to communicate," and the recursive self-consciousness of Erdedy is what he calls "this almost crippling self-consciousness". [sec. I]
• Notes: Reader-response evidence; Ismail advances no position on why Hal is reduced to noises (the hal-dmz / hal-condition cruxes) — he reads the scene thematically, as the emblem of the communication gap the whole oeuvre works. Ismail's IJ quotations are his own transcription (see apparatus): they map to scene 003 but are not byte-identical to the print raw.

Themes

Solipsism and the failure of communication; self-aware addiction and recursive self-consciousness; the rendered inner voice; loneliness as Wallace's subject across IJ, Oblivion, and The Pale King.

Cross-references

• parker-real-question-good-old-neon — the same Good Old Neon fraudulence-paradox monologue, read there as the center of Wallace's antidote-to-solipsism project; Ismail and Parker converge on the story.
• The Hal-opening reading pairs with the archive's communication/solipsism material and Hal's collapse (the opening interview, scene 003).
• The IJ → Oblivion → Pale King continuity claim complements the reception pieces in this batch (Baskin, the QC symposium).

Notable passages

• On the opening: the discrepancy "is one of the most basic human failings: the inability to communicate".
• On the inner voice: "there has never been an author that so successfully describes the inner voice."
• Good Old Neon: "My whole life I've been a fraud. I'm not exaggerating."