Requiescat in Pace (Kathleen Fitzpatrick)

TL;DR

A 2009 blog post by Kathleen Fitzpatrick — Wallace's actual Pomona English department colleague — that reproduces the formal memorial tribute she was asked to deliver to the full faculty after his death, framed by her reflections at the close of a semester teaching a course on his work. It is chiefly biographical and compositional testimony: a colleague's account of Wallace's life, career, and teaching, plus one editing datum about Infinite Jest's manuscript cuts. It also states, briefly, a reading of the novel's ending — the loop back to the beginning, answers deferred to "the world beyond" the text.

Key claims

• Fitzpatrick was Wallace's departmental colleague at Pomona, not merely a critic — a firsthand vantage. She taught a full-semester DFW course the spring after his death and delivered the college's official faculty memorial.
• Her governing argument, restated from her teaching: it is a mistake to read Wallace's work "as obituarists, mining the work for evidence of" "the tragedy to come," because "writing was no small part of what kept David alive." She warns against a "hagiographic mode of reading" that at once idolizes his genius and searches "for signs of his self-destruction."
• She distinguishes the public figure from the man, quoting Andrew Carlson '08 (Lapham's Quarterly): "There was David Foster Wallace, and there was Dave."
• Biographical spine: born February 21, 1962, Ithaca, New York (father James Wallace completing a philosophy PhD); moved to rural Illinois when he was three (father to UIUC); mother Sally Wallace taught at Parkland College, CASE National Professor of the Year 1996. Amherst College, graduated 1985 "a now" "famous double summa cum laude"; his English senior thesis became The Broom of the System (1987), his philosophy thesis won the Gail Kennedy Memorial Prize. NEA Fellowship 1989, Lannan Award 1996, MacArthur "Genius Grant" 1997; named to the American Heritage Dictionary Usage Panel in 1999.
• Teaching career: MFA Arizona; a visiting year at Amherst; two years adjunct at Emerson; Illinois State University from 1993; from 2002 the first Roy Edward Disney '51 Endowed Professor of Creative Writing at Pomona, where he met and married Karen Green.
• Compositional / editing datum: "Helping him cut hundreds of pages from the manuscript version of Infinite Jest must have been an extraordinarily difficult task"; Fitzpatrick quotes Wallace's reply to one of Michael Pietsch's suggested cuts — "I can give you 5000 words of theoretico-structural arguments for this, but let's spare one another, shall we?"
• Fitzpatrick reports that Wallace would have "hated it, hated" "knowing that people in his own building were spending that much time discussing his work" — the self-consciousness his fame produced in him.
• Her own reading experience closing the course: she kept "just wanting so badly for everything" "to turn out differently this time" as she neared the end of Infinite Jest — but found the end "easier than I thought it would be, more comfortable, more fitting."

Theories & evidence

THEORY: The novel's ending loops the reader back to its beginning, deferring resolution outside the text

• Crux: annular-structure
• Stance: endorses
• Evidence:
  • [secondary] Fitzpatrick, closing her memorial: "The novel's end guides its reader back around to the beginning, while at the" "same time hinting that whatever answers we're seeking won't be found in the text, but in" "the world beyond." [¶ closing section]
• Notes: Stated as a reader's felt experience at the end of a memorial, not argued as structural criticism; endorses the familiar circular/annular reading (the ending returns to the Year-of-Glad frame) and glosses it as a deliberate deferral of answers beyond the book. No scene cited in the source; no page or scene mapping asserted here.

Themes

Biography and the writer-as-teacher; the ethics of reading a suicide's work (the anti-obituarist, anti-hagiographic argument); fiction as empathy and communication ("become less alone inside"); the ending's circular structure.

Cross-references

• infinite-summer-fitzpatrick-teaching-ij — Fitzpatrick's July 2009 Infinite Summer guest essay on teaching IJ. Same author, same core argument (don't read the work as evidence of the suicide-to-come; imaginative identification with others is what kept Wallace alive). This piece is DISTINCT: it is the formal Pomona faculty memorial tribute, and it adds the biographical career spine, the Infinite Jest manuscript-cut / Pietsch datum, and the ending reading — none of which the teaching essay carries.

Notable passages

• Andrew Carlson '08, quoted: "There was David Foster Wallace, and there was Dave."
• Wallace to Pietsch, on a suggested cut: "I can give you 5000 words of theoretico-structural" / "arguments for this, but let's spare one another, shall we?"
• Fitzpatrick: "mining the work for evidence of" / "the tragedy to come."
• Fitzpatrick, on Wallace's aim: to help readers "become less alone inside."
• Carlson, quoted: "while Wallace understood well the solipsism of" / "he himself evinced none of it, in spite of his affliction."
• Fitzpatrick, closing: "The novel's end guides its reader back around to the beginning, while at the" / "same time hinting that whatever answers we're seeking won't be found in the text, but in" / "the world beyond."