IJ study archive

The World of David Foster Wallace

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TL;DR

A 2013 boundary 2 essay by Lee Konstantinou arguing that Wallace turns his narrowness of American focus into a deliberate performance of a "structural deficit of cosmopolitanism": rather than representing the world, Wallace demonstrates the limited, media-formed bounds of an "average, averagely bright" American imagination unable to see on a planetary scale. The reading centers on the 2004 novella "The Suffering Channel," with Infinite Jest appearing as a bounded but pointed case — ONAN read as an enlarged United States circa 1996, the novel taken as a critique of specifically American "possessive individualism" set against a communitarian Canadian ideology, and the Eschaton set piece read as a substantive parody of Cold-War geopolitical thinking (recalling DeLillo's End Zone and Baudrillard) rather than a comic interlude. It is a rigorous world-literature framing of Wallace's global positioning and one of the few sustained readings of his fiction as a post-postmodern break from the internationalism of Pynchon and DeLillo.

Key claims

  • The essay's core thesis: worldliness performed as its own absence. Wallace's achievement was to "redeploy the linguistic and cultural resources" of a "delimited, 'average'" American habitus to build "a strange sort of negative map of the world, as though someone had built a working fighter jet using only an erector set" (pp. 67-68). The point is not that Wallace is worldly but that he dramatizes, from the inside, the impossibility of worldliness for a media-formed American imagination.
  • A methodological argument against close reading. Konstantinou wants to stop asking what a text encodes about the world and ask instead how the world forms the text — aligning with Moretti's "distant reading" and Best/Marcus's "surface reading," and reading Wallace's parochialism as a symptom shaped by the neoliberal university's disinvestment in cosmopolitan citizens (pp. 63-67).
  • ONAN is an enlarged United States. In Infinite Jest, though its citizens "celebrate Interdependence Day rather than Independence Day," the Organization of North American Nations is "understood more as an enlarged version of the United States circa 1996" than anything else, despite its incorporation of Mexico and Canada (p. 68).
  • Infinite Jest as a critique of American "possessive individualism." The novel is "typically taken" as a critique of what N. Katherine Hayles calls the "paradoxical structures of possessive individualism" — an individualism its characters identify as specifically American, contrasted "humorously" with a more communitarian Canadian ideology; Konstantinou cites Michael North reading the novel's conflict as American selfishness against a Canadian "version of collectivity or selflessness" (p. 68, n. 28).
  • Eschaton is a substantive geopolitical parody. The set piece "recalls DeLillo’s End Zone and parodies the thought of Baudrillard" (his phrase), treating tennis courts as a map of the world and tennis balls as ICBMs; the Enfield students are "obsessed with nerdy geopolitics and a mode of strategic thinking" Wallace ties to his postmodernist forebears while remaining detached from the "reality right in front of their noses" (p. 68; Konstantinou cites Grausam's Cold-War strategic-planning reading, n. 29).
  • The A.F.R. figure the outside of the media loop. The wheelchair-bound Quebecois separatists — "a Quebecois separatist group known as Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents [sic]" — are the group imagined to sit outside the "narcissistic media loop ONAN has constructed" (p. 68-69). The Pale King, he adds, is even more inward-looking than Infinite Jest (p. 69).
  • A clear break from Pynchon and DeLillo. Wallace inherits the encyclopedic, worldly ambition of his predecessors but there is "a clear break in Wallace’s fiction" from their internationalism: it has become "increasingly hard, even in an age of globalization, to imagine an outside to American culture", and Wallace rejects the globe-trotting solution of a contemporary like Vollmann, whose travel he reads as a species of bohemian tourism (pp. 69-70).
  • "The Suffering Channel" reading (the essay's spine). The US media is a closed, excremental loop dividing arrogant coastal producers from envious midwestern consumers; the pseudocosmopolitanism of Style magazine's interns (their toilet-design chatter, their celebrity-defecation fantasy, the alien-observer "corollary vision") stages a disidentification that exposes an American reader's own inability to imagine a genuine outside (pp. 68-80).
  • A formal claim: Wallace reverses the "reality effect." In the novella, description does the work of narration and plot is "outsourced to history" — the pending 9/11 attacks — so that dread saturates static detail (dates, the address "1 World Trade Center"), inverting Barthes and Lukács (pp. 80-83).
  • The diagnosis is institutional, not personal. Wallace was "avowedly a creature of the school"; the failure to produce cosmopolitan citizens is a failure of the program-era university, so the remedy "must be collective and institutional, not individual and private" (pp. 84-86).

Theories & evidence

THEORY: The Eschaton set piece is a substantive parody of Cold-War geopolitical thinking — recalling DeLillo's End Zone and parodying Baudrillard — not a pointless comic interlude

  • Cruxes: eschaton-function, delillo-influence
  • Stance: advances
  • Evidence:
    • [secondary] Konstantinou reads Eschaton as one of the novel's celebrated set pieces "recalls DeLillo’s End Zone and parodies the thought of Baudrillard," treating tennis courts as a map of the world and tennis balls as intercontinental ballistic missiles. [p. 68]
    • [inference] The players are "obsessed with nerdy geopolitics and a mode of strategic thinking" Wallace associates with his postmodernist forebears, while staying detached from the "reality right in front of their noses" — the game means something: it stages, and satirizes, a postmodern strategic detachment from the real. [p. 68]
    • [secondary] Cited support: Dan Grausam's reading of the Eschaton scene "in terms of Cold War strategic planning" (On Endings: American Postmodern Fiction and the Cold War, 98-103). [p. 68, n. 29]
  • Notes: A substantive-function reading (Eschaton has a point beyond entertainment), landing against the pure-comic pole. Distinctive from the archive's other substantive-function witnesses: Konstantinou names Baudrillard directly as the parodic target and pairs Eschaton with DeLillo's End Zone, where other readings reach the anti-simulation point via Borges or via the novel's own map/territory lecture. Konstantinou gives no Infinite Jest page for the scene; the annual Eschaton game is (scene 073). The End Zone pairing is also a delillo-influence datum, echoing the End Zone-to-Enfield descent itemized elsewhere in the criticism. No in-source pushback against this reading (the essay treats it as given, en route to its argument about The Suffering Channel).

THEORY: Wallace is a post-postmodern writer who inherits the encyclopedic, worldly ambition of Pynchon and DeLillo but decisively breaks from their internationalism

  • Cruxes: pynchon-influence, delillo-influence
  • Stance: complicates
  • Evidence:
    • [secondary] "a clear break in Wallace’s fiction" from the internationalism of writers such as Pynchon and DeLillo: Wallace grants the debt but finds it "increasingly hard, even in an age of globalization, to imagine an outside to American culture" for a contemporary American. [pp. 69-70]
    • [inference] Wallace rejects the globe-trotting solution of a competitor like William T. Vollmann, reading such travel as a species of "bohemian tourism" and countercultural irony; the harder task, for Wallace, is to stand still and observe one's own location. [pp. 69-70]
  • Notes: This complicates the influence cruxes rather than advancing them: the Pynchon/DeLillo lineage is affirmed at the level of encyclopedic ambition but bounded — Wallace's post-postmodern position is defined by his inability to replicate their worldly reach. A DFW-career claim, not scoped to a single Infinite Jest plot point.

Themes

World literature and cosmopolitanism (the "structural deficit of cosmopolitanism"; genuine cosmopolitanism against the pseudocosmopolitanism of the media class). Entertainment and the media loop (the closed, narcissistic US mediasphere — the same preoccupation Infinite Jest works through its samizdat and its ONAN, here diagnosed as a failure of worldliness). Nationalism and the US/Canada axis (possessive individualism as a specifically American disease; American selfishness against Canadian communitarianism; the wheelchair-bound A.F.R. as the imagined outside to the loop). Postmodernism and its inheritance (Wallace as post-postmodern; the break from Pynchon/DeLillo internationalism; Eschaton as a parody of postmodern strategic thinking). History and 9/11 (dread; the reversal of the "reality effect," plot outsourced to history). Class and geography (coastal producers against midwestern consumers of media).

Cross-references

  • e-unibus-pluram — the closed, narcissistic media loop Konstantinou finds in Wallace is the same television-culture critique of the 1990 essay, here reframed as a problem of worldliness rather than of irony.
  • hf-badger-eschaton, hf-raizman-call-it-something-i-ate, hf-theuwis-quest-encyclopedic-postmodern — the archive's other readings of Eschaton as a meaningful set piece rather than a comic aside; Konstantinou joins that side, naming Baudrillard as the parodic target where Badger reaches the anti-simulation point through Borges.
  • harbach-nplusone-2004, chambers-crowd-and-individual-delillo — the DeLillo lineage behind the tennis academy; Konstantinou's End Zone pointer is another witness to that descent.
  • kelly-dialectic-of-sincerity — the New Sincerity strand; Konstantinou's companion essay "No Bull: David Foster Wallace and Postironic Belief" (2012) works Wallace's postironic sincerity, where this essay works the global/worldliness axis instead.
  • burn-conversations-with-dfw — the source of Wallace's "slice open my head" self-description that anchors the essay's account of his method (Conversations with David Foster Wallace, p. 86).

Notable passages

  • "a strange sort of negative map of the world, as though someone had built a working fighter jet using only an erector set" (on Wallace's method of performing worldliness as its own absence) (p. 68)
  • "understood more as an enlarged version of the United States circa 1996" (on reading ONAN) (p. 68)
  • "recalls DeLillo’s End Zone and parodies the thought of Baudrillard" (on the Eschaton set piece) (p. 68)
  • "narcissistic media loop ONAN has constructed" (the A.F.R. as its outside) (pp. 68-69)
  • "I will slice open my head for you. And let you see a cross-section of just a kind of average, averagely bright person’s head at this thing." (Wallace on his own writing, quoted from Burn's Conversations) (p. 68, n. 26)

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