From the Mixed-Up Files of David Foster Wallace

TL;DR

Seth Colter Walls's November 2010 Daily Beast/Newsweek piece is the first substantial press tour of the just-opened David Foster Wallace archive at the Harry Ransom Center, and it remains a useful overview of what the collection holds and what it changes about how Wallace is read. Its argument is reputational: the archive — 20,000-plus papers, heavy on other writers' books and teaching materials, nearly empty of personal correspondence — "corrects Wallace's reputation as one of the most abstruse of writers," revealing instead a teacher and moralist whose marginalia keep reaching for empathy and connection. For Infinite Jest readers its one genuinely load-bearing datum is a compositional one: a draft in which Wallace "considered delivering a copy of 'the Entertainment' to the character of Don Gately."

Key claims

• The archive holds more than 20,000 of Wallace's papers and books, alongside a complete Gutenberg Bible, letters of James Joyce's, and DeLillo and Mailer collections. Unlike DeLillo's papers, it has almost no personal correspondence — agent and literary executor Bonnie Nadell: "He just didn't keep much of that," Wallace having resisted e-mail (and even then only dial-up) until the 2000s.
• The collection was assembled in an "emergency sort-and-salvage operation": after Wallace's 2008 suicide, Nadell and his widow Karen Green went through the garage papers, uncovering the unfinished The Pale King, teaching materials, and "more than 300 heavily annotated books from his personal library."
• The headline artifact is a one-page story the 9-year-old Wallace wrote on Feb. 7, 1972, narrated by a tea kettle ("Hi I am a kettle,") that heats water for the abusive Oomp family and cannot escape ("But I can't leave them") — read by Walls as an early sighting of a "Wallace archetype": finding purpose in a job that also brings misery, hoping writing itself might be a solution.
• Teaching materials (Pomona, up to the spring before his death): his marked copies of assigned works — Lorrie Moore's "People Like That Are the Only People Here", Stephen King's Carrie, Thomas Harris's Red Dragon ("a hard novel, at least the way we'll be reading it").
• Marginalia of empathy: in Tolstoy's "What Is Art?" Wallace underlines the art-as-transmission-of-feeling passage and writes "Art as Empathy" in the margin (plus a cross-note to "Schopenhauer's Basis of Morality").
• Barth marginalia: in his copy of Lost in the Funhouse Wallace calls Barth's writing "Talmudic--obsessed w/its own interpretation" — a line that recurs nearly verbatim in his novella Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way — and drafts Westward's character names and plot into the Barth book's margins.
• Infinite Jest drafts: the progression "shows greater and greater emphasis on the novel's characters, often at the expense of stylish literary asides," and includes cut material — a "hilariously hard grammar quiz proctored by one protagonist's mother"; a halfway-house panhandler with schemes for fleecing financiers; far more Canadian-terrorist / intelligence-agency dialogue than the editor could "personally stomach."
• The Entertainment / Gately draft variant: "In one draft, Wallace considered delivering a copy of 'the Entertainment' to the character of Don Gately." The published Entertainment is described as "a video 'cartridge' so diverting that a viewer can stop watching it only when she dies."
• Pale King research already in the archive: typed letters to a tax lawyer ("the single most confusing sentence in the tax code"), accounting-class notes on tax shelters and 1979 FEC "soft money," and the scrawl "Accountants are cowboys of information."

Theories & evidence

THEORY: In an early draft, the lethal Entertainment reaches Don Gately — a discarded route for the film's spread and Gately's endgame

• Crux: gately-fate
• Stance: mentions
• Evidence:
  • [draft] "In one draft, Wallace considered delivering a copy of 'the Entertainment' to the character of Don Gately." [¶ "More substantially, the early drafts of Jest…"]
• Notes: The article reports this as a considered draft option, not as a suppressed fact about the published novel; it advances no reading of the ending. Recorded as a [draft] sighting because it bears on two live cruxes — Gately's fate and how/whether the Entertainment disseminates (ending-missing-year; dissemination is registered under orin-mailer) — where a discarded "Gately gets the Entertainment" branch is directly relevant to the argument about what the finished text withholds. Cite-as-written: source is a journalist paraphrasing the drafts, not the drafts themselves; treat as a lead for the folding/crux seats, not as settled draft evidence.

Themes

Archive and reputation (the "correction" of the abstruse-postmodernist image); teaching and the writer-as-reader; empathy and moral seriousness (the Tolstoy "Art as Empathy" note, the tea-kettle archetype); addiction and entertainment (the IJ premise, restated); the genesis of The Pale King (boredom, bureaucracy, civic philosophy).

Cross-references

• dtmax-every-love-story — the biography that gives the full account of the garage salvage, the Pale King discovery, and the archive's formation; this piece is the contemporaneous press version.
• theawl-bustillos-self-help-library and wordnik-dfw-circled-dictionary-words — other reads of the same "300-odd annotated books" / marginalia holdings; Bustillos on the self-help shelf, this piece on the Tolstoy/Barth marginalia.
• The Barth marginalia and the Westward line bear on Wallace's working-through of Barth, American postmodernism, and TV-irony — the territory of "E Unibus Pluram"; noted here as archive evidence, not argued.
• Same author: S.C. Walls also wrote a New Yorker piece on Wallace's tax-classes research, a Pale King companion to this overview.
• The cut "grammar quiz proctored by one protagonist's mother" connects to the Avril-as-militant-grammarian material (see the Bustillos note).

Notable passages

• The 9-year-old's tea kettle: "Hi I am a kettle," and, of the abusive Oomps, "But I can't leave them."
• On the archive's gap — "there's next to no personal correspondence in the Wallace archive"; Nadell: "He just didn't keep much of that," Wallace having resisted e-mail for years.
• Wallace's Tolstoy margin note: "Art as Empathy."
• Wallace on Barth: "Talmudic--obsessed w/its own interpretation."
• The draft variant: Wallace "considered delivering a copy of 'the Entertainment' to the character of Don Gately."
• Wallace's accounting note: "Accountants are cowboys of information."