IJ study archive

In the archive with David Foster Wallace

source

TL;DR

A 2011 New Statesman piece by DFW scholar Graham Foster reporting on the newly opened Harry Ransom Center archive, built around one argument: the papers deflate the "genius"/"meta-human" myth and restore an ordinary, insecure, hard-working "Dave Wallace." Its most substantial Infinite Jest material comes not from the (deliberately "clean," work-only) Wallace manuscripts but from the neighbouring Don DeLillo papers, where the 1992-2001 Wallace-to-DeLillo letters show Wallace treating DeLillo as a mentor and openly worrying that parts of IJ may seem "piratical" — with IJ notes jotted in the margins of his annotated DeLillo novels. The piece also records IJ draft marginalia of self-doubt (a "I don't want to be writing" scrawl by the future footnote 110), the Pietsch editing relationship, and the tax-law classes behind The Pale King. It brings primary archival evidence to one long-argued question — DeLillo's influence on IJ — and is otherwise a reception/biographical demystification of the archive itself.

Key claims

  • The archive, demystified: the Ransom Center holds "36 million manuscript pages, five million photographs," and the DFW archive (opened September 2010) contains correspondence, drafts, juvenilia, and "306 annotated books from Wallace's personal library." Foster's thesis: it is "not a shimmering wormhole into Wallace's personal psyche or a curtain-twitching view into his private life." Archivist Stephen Cooper calls the manuscripts "clean" — "primarily work-related, with little annotation other than that to do with the nuts and bolts of writing" (editorial marks, corrections, and the frequent "Stet").
  • The DeLillo letters (1992-2001) are where Wallace's guard drops: he engages DeLillo "with an almost childish insecurity," worrying about his ability and self-discipline and bemoaning the "daily temptation to dick around." He treats DeLillo as a mentor, and "he openly worries about the influence DeLillo has on his work," admitting in the letters that parts of Infinite Jest (1996) may seem "piratical".
  • The influence is materially visible in the collection: in the Wallace-annotated copies of DeLillo's novels, "notes for Infinite Jest have been jotted on the title pages and in the margins".
  • Wallace as cultural consumer: his mini film-reviews to DeLillo show him "an unpretentious consumer of entertainment (a theme in much of his fiction)"; he urges DeLillo toward The Matrix and Boiler Room, pitching the latter on Giovanni Ribisi's face — "male but like something right out of Klimt at his ghastliest".
  • The IJ drafts carry margin self-doubt: the pages are "intricately numbered" (sequential numbers with letter-labelled sub-pages), and among them are "splurges of this self-doubt" — Wallace scrawls "I don't want to be writing" as he constructs what would become footnote 110, and a "Thank God!" on its completion, alongside "maudlin, teenager-like" reactions to failed relationships.
  • The Pietsch editing was long and two-directional: with his "astute, level-headed editor Michael Pietsch," Wallace did work that began "around 1994 and would continue for almost two years", Pietsch balancing artistic improvement against making the novel "more approachable to the paying reader" — commercially-minded alterations Wallace told DeLillo made him feel "slutty."
  • Genesis of The Pale King: the archive reveals Wallace "even took tedious classes in tax law" for the posthumous novel; Foster braces for a fresh "storm" of genius-mythologising at its release, against which he sets "Dave," who "worked so hard to depict what it means to be a human being in this world" and "sweated each sentence to achieve perfect prose".

Theories & evidence

THEORY: DeLillo is the literary mentor Infinite Jest answers — Wallace worried the novel was derivative of him

  • Crux: delillo-influence
  • Stance: advances
  • Evidence:
    • [author] In the 1992-2001 letters Wallace treats DeLillo as a mentor and admits parts of Infinite Jest may seem "piratical", openly worrying about DeLillo's influence on his work. [¶4-5]
    • [draft] The archive's Wallace-annotated copies of DeLillo's novels carry "notes for Infinite Jest... jotted on the title pages and in the margins" — material evidence that IJ was drafted alongside close DeLillo reading. [¶4]
    • [secondary] Foster (a DFW doctoral scholar) frames the relationship as mentor/anxiety-of-influence, the papers where "a clearer image of Wallace the writer surfaces". [¶4]
  • Notes: Primary-archival strengthening of a reading the criticism otherwise carries mostly on secondary evidence (the Bloomian Mao II / End Zone lineage arguments). Wallace's "piratical" self-accusation is the Bloomian anxiety of influence stated by the author himself; the marginal IJ notes in the DeLillo books are a concrete compositional trace. No counter-position is raised in the source.

Themes

Anxiety of influence and literary inheritance (DeLillo as father-figure); the demystification of authorship (against the "genius"/"time-space continuum" myth, for "one of us"); the labour and self-doubt of composition (the margin scrawls, the two-year Pietsch edit); art versus the market (the "slutty" feeling about approachability edits); and entertainment/consumption (Wallace's own unpretentious film-watching as a key to his fiction's preoccupations).

Cross-references

Notable passages

  • Zadie Smith on Wallace: "in a different time-space continuum from the rest of us" — the genius-myth Foster sets out to deflate.
  • On the archive's character: "not a shimmering wormhole into Wallace's personal psyche or a curtain-twitching view into his private life"; the manuscripts are "primarily work-related, with little annotation other than that to do with the nuts and bolts of writing".
  • On DeLillo: "he openly worries about the influence DeLillo has on his work," and "notes for Infinite Jest have been jotted on the title pages and in the margins" of his DeLillo copies.
  • The IJ draft scrawl: "I don't want to be writing".
  • The Boiler Room mini-review: Ribisi's face is "male but like something right out of Klimt at his ghastliest".
  • The closing case for "Dave": he "worked so hard to depict what it means to be a human being in this world," and "sweated each sentence to achieve perfect prose".

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