IJ study archive

The First Draft Version of Infinite Jest

source

TL;DR

Steven Moore — RCF/Dalkey editor, early DFW champion, and one of three people to read the 1993 working draft — owns a photocopy of the manuscript Wallace gave him on 3 December 1993 to suggest cuts. This essay (first posted 2003) is a page-by-page MS-to-published-book collation: what was cut, what moved, what was renamed, and — the biggest surprise — how much was added after 1993. Keeping quotes minimal for copyright reasons, it's the closest publicly available view of IJ's composition short of the Harry Ransom Center archive.

Key claims

  • The draft was a working mess: patchwork fonts, nested pagination (22, 22A–J, 23…), footnotes at page bottoms (most endnotes added later), marginal notes and doodles. Wallace deliberately set some sections in 8-point type to disguise the length from his editor ("who of course wasn't fooled for an instant").
  • Wallace cut very little and added enormously. Moore counts only ~40 pages cut (almost none of the ones he suggested), versus 200+ pages added in 1994–95, including: the entire Year-of-Glad opening (originally the novel began with the "professional conversationalist" scene, IJ 27–31), the mold-eating incident, ALL the Marathe/Steeply Tucson dialogues and most of the AFR material, the videophony essay, the Eschaton aftermath expansion, Mario's romantic encounter, the bricklayer e-mail, and roughly half the endnotes. The legend that the publisher "cut 300-400 pages" puzzles him.
  • Names changed: Orin was "Cully" (also "Hugh"); Avril was "Constance Bilodeau" (sometimes "Elaine," from New Brunswick not Quebec); Joelle was "Joelle ver Nooy," daughter of an Arkansas pipe-fitter, not yet the P.G.O.A.T.; Helen Steeply was "Helen Slansker"; Poor Tony was "Queer Tony"; Jim Struck was "Rutherford Poat"; the Year of the Whopper was the Year of the Twinkie; Ennet House founding year and several subsidized-year labels shifted (the dating "gave Wallace quite a bit of trouble").
  • The geopolitics changed late: through the rest of the MS the expected exhibition opponents are Ukrainians, not Quebecois; the opening crisis was Sierra Leone, not southern Quebec. The Quebec/AFR superstructure is substantially a post-1993 addition.
  • Stice's "The Darkness" was literally "the Wraith" in the MS — Hal even calls him "Wraithster" — hardening the published novel's hints (IJ 943) that JOI's wraith haunts Stice.
  • The ending was always the ending: "The main narrative of the MS concludes just as the novel does; Wallace knew early on how he wanted it to end." After Gately's final line, the MS adds enigmatic outline notes: "18 – Hal and Helen, Hal and Exhibition, Pemulis and DMZ / 19 – Gately and Joelle. 'They sewed his eyes open and Superglued the back of his head to the wall and propped the TP viewer in front of him… mirrors all around him so he couldn't look away'" — apparent plans for the missing-year material that the published book only implies (cf. Gately's fever dream/wraith material and the ending-theory debate).
  • Notable cut scenes (described, minimally quoted): Avril post-coital with an unnamed older lover (early); young JOI killing a black widow with his father ("I have one sober memory of my father…"); Hal's history-of-his-drug-use passages (cut repeatedly — Wallace kept removing explicit Hal-drug exposition); Gately witnessing a "giant feral infant" sighting; the Marguerite/Isle of Demons anecdote (sourced from Parkman, who also supplied AFR names); a catatonic "Thing" eavesdropping at Ennet House; Lyle's fable of the Smart Old Bee; Madame Psychosis's "two planes of glass" love letter; Orin's moths-at-the-window-as-us-before-God phone message; two pages of AA testimonials; six channel-surf snippets incl. JOI's "Cage I" and Hal's essays on pennies and ducks.
  • Editorial trivia: the 1997 paperback is the corrected text scholars should use (e.g., Hal "thirteen" → "eleven"); Moore caught the Huxley/Watts anachronism; the MS title page reads "First Two Sections / Infinite Jest" with no "A Failed Entertainment" subtitle; marginal note on the title page already sketches DMZ's effects: "no speech--Death[.] See Wraith & Gately."
  • Moore's closing RCF review frames IJ as heir to the encyclopedic novel (Gaddis/Pynchon), "a Naked Lunch for the nineties," addiction as response to "the need to excel in the Reagan eighties" — and explains the "comic"/"tragicomic" misquote on the book jacket.
  • The draft's circulation was tiny: per Moore, Wallace made exactly two photocopies of the manuscript — one for his editor Michael Pietsch, one loaned "to a young woman whom he was trying to impress at the time." The Pietsch copy is the only draft copy ever to surface in commerce.

Themes

Composition history; the ending (authorial intent evidence); wraith mechanics; chronology/Subsidized Time instability; Hal's drug history (deliberately obscured); Hal-as-narrator question (several MS first-person "I"s and "It's unclear to me…" formulations support it).

Cross-references

Notable passages

"Merely flipping through the 4-inch-high manuscript would give even a seasoned editor the howling fantods."

"The main narrative of the MS concludes just as the novel does; Wallace knew early on how he wanted it to end."

Wallace's inscription in Moore's first edition: "For Steve--Thank you. Your suggestions in 93/94 made this better."

Advances