What the Hell is Water? Priming, Epiphany, and David Foster Wallace's Roadmap to Freedom from the Default Setting

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TL;DR

A conference paper (Antwerp "Work in Process," Sept 2012; posted to the Letters to DFW blog after a journal rejection) by Ryan Blanck arguing that Wallace's Kenyon speech, This is Water, is a "third interpretive lens" — alongside "E Unibus Pluram" and the McCaffery interview — for reading all of Wallace, and that its argument (imprisonment by the "default setting"; escape via "priming", epiphany, and the daily choice to make meaning) culminates in The Pale King. Its spine is This is Water and The Pale King, not Infinite Jest, so this is mostly non-IJ criticism; Infinite Jest supplies corroborating evidence — addiction as the default-setting cage (Boswell's reading of the "bars of the cage"), Joelle's cage-or-door question, Gately's detox "wall around each second", and the "destiny's kisses and its dope-slaps" line — rather than being the paper's subject, and the reading is developed on the later work.

Key claims

The three-lens thesis: This is Water "completes our understanding of Wallace's writing" and "deserves a place alongside" "E Unibus Pluram" and the McCaffery interview "as a third interpretive lens through which to read the rest of his works", providing "the clearest distillation Wallace ever gave of the themes that run through his fiction" (Blanck quoting Kevin Hartnett).
The default setting and its jailers: the "default setting" is narcissism, over-analysis, and boredom — a "prison of solipsism". "Many of Wallace's characters - particularly Hal Incandenza and Don Gately from Infinite Jest - struggle with some form of drug addiction, which proves to be merely a thin veil for their self-constructed cages".
Addiction as a false exit (via Boswell): quoting Marshall Boswell, drugs and entertainment offer a release from self-consciousness that results "in the construction of an even more confining cage," such that "what looks like the cage's exit is actually bars of the cage" (Infinite Jest 222); and Joelle's question of the film — "Was the fatally entertaining and scopophiliac thing... a cage or really a door?" (230) — answered: "a door to another cage."
Hyper-self-consciousness: citing Boswell that the "disease that makes its command headquarters in the head" (Infinite Jest 272) "is not just addiction to substances but also hyper-self-consciousness in general", illustrated by Pale King's Sylvanshine and Cusk.
The roadmap out: "priming" (coming to see one's true condition), epiphany (Fogle's wrong-classroom conversion; Lane Dean's "moment of grace"), and the "day-in, day-out" work of choosing meaning — Gately's detox is offered as the epitomic IJ instance: "he had to build a wall around each second just to take it... An endless Now" (860).
Powerlessness and grace: the paradox that the catalyst for freedom is often outside our control is anchored in IJ — "both destiny's kisses and its dope-slaps illustrate an individual person's basic personal powerlessness over the really meaningful events in his life" (291).
Faith as necessary: against Dreyfus and Kelly's All Things Shining (which reads Wallace's project as pure willpower, hence "a human impossibility" that contributed to his suicide), Blanck argues This is Water insists on "some sort of god or spirit-type thing" — Gately's AA Higher Power is the IJ instance.
The unfinished-quest coda: just as the narrator "David Wallace" vanishes partway through The Pale King, the real Wallace "left us far too early," raising the question — "is final victory over the default setting even possible?" Blanck's answer: it is "a fight worth fighting."

Theories & evidence

THEORY: This is Water is a third master-lens for Wallace's whole corpus — Infinite Jest's addiction plots are one dramatization of imprisonment by the "default setting," escaped only through attention, faith, and daily meaning-making

Crux: this-is-water-connection
Stance: endorses
Evidence:
- [secondary] Frames IJ's Hal and Gately as default-setting prisoners whose addiction is "a thin veil for their self-constructed cages". [sec. narcissism]
- [text] Gately's detox — "build a wall around each second", "An endless Now" — as the epitomic instance of the daily "day-in, day-out" work (scene 166, pp. 854-864). [sec. final step]
- [text] "destiny's kisses and its dope-slaps" / basic powerlessness (scene 068, pp. 283-299) read as Wallace's version of grace-from-outside. [sec. paradoxes]
- [text] Gately's AA Higher Power as the IJ case of the required "faith in something bigger than himself." [sec. faith]
Notes: The lens is built on This is Water and The Pale King; IJ is corroboration, not the object. In-source counter-reading carried (counterevidence clause): Dreyfus and Kelly argue the meaning-making Wallace prescribed is "a human impossibility" he could not achieve, a mirage that "contributed, at least in part, to his tragic suicide" — Blanck disputes this by insisting on transcendence/faith, but the tension is left open ("is final victory… even possible?").

THEORY: In Infinite Jest, the apparent exit from the cage of the self — drugs, entertainment — is itself the deeper cage; "what looks like the cage's exit is actually bars of the cage"

Crux: cage-self-built
Stance: endorses
Evidence:
- [secondary] Boswell's reading quoted: release from self-consciousness "results… in the construction of an even more confining cage" — "what looks like the cage's exit is actually bars of the cage" (IJ 222, scene 058, pp. 219-223). [sec. Boswell block]
- [text] Joelle's "Was the fatally entertaining and scopophiliac thing... a cage or really a door?" (IJ 230, scene 062, pp. 227-240, as Blanck compresses it — the print has "allegedly" before "fatally" and "Jim alleges he made" after "thing"), answered "a door to another cage." [sec.]
- [secondary] The "disease that makes its command headquarters in the head" (IJ 272, scene 066, pp. 270-281) glossed as hyper-self-consciousness, not only substance addiction. [sec.]
Notes: All three IJ points are routed through Boswell's Understanding David Foster Wallace; the cage-exit line is Boswell's formulation built around a genuine novel phrase ("bars of the cage", scene 058), quoted by Blanck. The page attributions check out against the novel: pp. 222, 230, and 272 land where the cited phrases sit.

Themes

Addiction and recovery (the cage, the default setting, Gately's AA); entertainment (Joelle's film as cage or door, distraction as false freedom); communication and solipsism (the "prison of solipsism", hyper-self-consciousness); faith and worship (the transcendence argument); boredom and attention (the Pale King spine). Depression and suicide frame the coda.

Cross-references

The This-is-Water worship-and-attention material sits beside the archive's other readings of that speech; the Marathe/Steeply reading of choosing what to love in sancrucensis-freedom-is-overrated is a sibling use of the same Wallace ethic.
Draws its IJ readings from Marshall Boswell's Understanding David Foster Wallace, a secondary source the archive also leans on.
Engages Dreyfus & Kelly's All Things Shining as the reading to beat — a rare named IJ/Wallace counter-position (freedom-as-mirage).
Novel anchors: scene 058 (the "bars of the cage", pp. 219-223), scene 062 (Joelle's cage-or-door question, pp. 227-240), scene 066 (the disease with its "command headquarters in the head", pp. 270-281), scene 068 ("destiny's kisses and its dope-slaps", pp. 283-299), scene 166 (Gately's detox "endless Now", pp. 854-864).

Notable passages

"This speech, later published under the title This is Water, completes our understanding of Wallace's writing" (Blanck, on the three-lens thesis).
"Many of Wallace's characters - particularly Hal Incandenza and Don Gately from Infinite Jest - struggle with some form of drug addiction" (Blanck).
"what looks like the cage's exit is actually bars of the cage" (Boswell, quoting IJ 222, as quoted by Blanck).
"he had to build a wall around each second just to take it" (Blanck, quoting IJ 860 on Gately's detox).
"both destiny's kisses and its dope-slaps illustrate an individual person's basic personal powerlessness over the really meaningful events in his life" (Blanck, quoting IJ 291).