IJ study archive

Tributes to David Foster Wallace (McSweeney's Internet Tendency)

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TL;DR

The McSweeney's "Tributes to David Foster Wallace" page is the companion to the "Memories" collection — some thirty-five short tributes from readers and writers, posted in the weeks after Wallace's September 2008 death. Like its sibling, it is reception evidence rather than argument: contributors testify to what Wallace's work did to and for them. Its Infinite Jest-relevant strand is the reader's sense that the novel is about — and enacts — loneliness and the reach toward connection ("I needed human contact … in the face of the loneliness of the book"), and the anti-irony ethic readers took from him ("irony and apathy mask the truth of how we feel"). It also preserves a small primary anecdote about Wallace's response to a teacher's firing over assigning "Girl With Curious Hair." It advances no reading of a novel crux; the connection-to-IJ material is reader reception, flagged as such.

Key claims

  • A reception corpus. ~35 short tributes (James Sepsey, Jan Richman, Craig Belanger, Elizabeth Crane, Alex Ross, Blake Butler, and others), overwhelmingly reader/writer testimony to Wallace's influence and generosity.
  • IJ as an engine of connection. One tribute: "The first time I finished Infinite Jest, I had to pick up the phone. I needed to talk to someone. I needed human contact, a genuine connection, in the face of the loneliness of the book" — and wonders "if this was intentional: that we were meant to be so saddened we had to reach out". (A reader's reception of the novel's loneliness/connection effect, adjacent to the "fiction combats loneliness" ethic; a reader's speculation, not an argued reading.)
  • The anti-irony ethic, in reception. Another contributor: Wallace "taught me that irony and apathy mask the truth of how we feel, and that we are capable of much more" — the sincerity reading of his project, in a reader's words.
  • Biographical/geographic reception. A former Arizona MFA student recalls following Wallace's traces and even living "in some of the places he writes about in Infinite Jest (Tucson; Beverly, Massachusetts; etc.)", adding "He wrote so beautifully about pain, but who knew he was just like us?"
  • A primary anecdote (via a quoted news story). Jan Richman, laid off from an adjunct creative-writing job at San Francisco's Academy of Art College in part for assigning the story "Girl With Curious Hair" (which administrators found "disturbing and inappropriate"), reproduces the San Francisco Chronicle exchange (James Sullivan's story) in which Wallace — surprised his story had figured in an expulsion and a fellow teacher's dismissal — defended teaching difficult work: "You don't punish a kid for doing a story that's all [gratuitous content], because they're beginners", calling the campus-offense question "a combination of moral spasms and legal terror."

Themes

Reception and fandom; loneliness and the reach toward human connection (the reader's IJ experience); irony versus sincerity (the ethic readers took from Wallace); Wallace's defense of difficult, "disturbing" fiction; grief and the loss of "my favorite living writer." (No IJ interpretive crux is argued.)

Cross-references

Notable passages

  • "The first time I finished Infinite Jest, I had to pick up the phone. I needed to talk to someone."
  • "I needed human contact, a genuine connection, in the face of the loneliness of the book."
  • "I've wondered if this was intentional: that we were meant to be so saddened we had to reach out".
  • "he taught me that irony and apathy mask the truth of how we feel".
  • "He wrote so beautifully about pain, but who knew he was just like us?"