In the D.F.W. Archives: An Unfinished Story About the Internet

TL;DR

D.T. Max's October 2012 New Yorker Page-Turner piece introduces "Wickedness" (also "Wickeder"), an unfinished David Foster Wallace story of around 2000 found in the newly opened Pale King boxes at the Harry Ransom Center — a noir-inflected tale of a dying tabloid reporter stalking an Alzheimer's-stricken Reagan for the Web. Its interest for Infinite Jest readers is Max's argument that the story returns to "the great theme of 'Infinite Jest': the lethal power of media", now relocated online — making "Wickedness" a bridge between the novel's death-by-Entertainment premise and the Internet age, and a useful test of the recurring reading of the novel as "actually about the Web," which Wallace himself flatly resisted. The piece is a fresh D.T. Max archive essay, separate from his 2009 profile and 2012 biography, and the only archive source the collection holds on this unfinished story.

Key claims

• Readers keep asking "what David Foster Wallace would have made of the Web," though he lived into the Facebook/Twitter era; his media theme was framed around television, and Infinite Jest's plot "hinges on the whereabouts of a short movie so entertaining that it kills whoever watches it" — a videocartridge that "even in 1996 … would have seemed a little dated."
• On publication, "the more perceptive critics" read Infinite Jest as "actually about the Web": Sven Birkerts (Atlantic) said it "should be seen... as a response to an altered cultural sensibility." Wallace demurred — "You don't have to be on the Internet for life to feel this way" — and said "he had never been online."
• A ~1999 notebook cover (pictured with the piece) shows Wallace's analogue working method — scotch tape and scissors, taped-in dictionary definitions, plot starts, a Beckett quote, a happy-face squiggle, his address with a reward offer, and a crossed-out phone number (changed to keep ahead of fans).
• "Wickedness" (~2000) "appears to connect to no other Wallace project" — unusual for a writer who recycled everything — and returns to Infinite Jest's theme: "the lethal power of media. Only this time, he posits that the locus of our self-annihilation has moved online."
• Plot: a tabloid reporter, Skyles, dying of mouth cancer (half his face masked by "a hardened latex appliance"), tries to photograph a demented Reagan at the San Placido Institute ("the Betty Ford of nursing homes") for Wicked.com; invented sites (Latrine.com, 10footpoll.com, filth.com) publish humiliating celebrity photos. Wallace on the Web: "what it really was was the bathroom wall of the U.S. psyche."
• The story "stops suddenly" at ~4,000 words, undecided whether Skyles will shoot or renege; margin notes read "I'm trying," and "Blankness is OK." Max: "Blankness in the end won out."
• A final Infinite Jest-like turn: foreign governments sense the power of "this new technology mated to our ancient self-destructive appetites," with a last-page margin note — "Internet Site Owned by Russians" — Wallace never developed.

Theories & evidence

THEORY: Infinite Jest is prescient about the Internet — its death-by-media premise reads as an anticipation of the Web, even though it was framed around television

• Crux: media-prescience
• Stance: advances
• Evidence:
  • [secondary] Sven Birkerts's Atlantic review read the novel — "with its schizophrenic narrative movement and overstuffed cabinet of characters" — as "actually about the Web," "a response to an altered cultural sensibility." [¶ "Not everyone took this plot device at face value…"]
  • [draft] The unfinished "Wickedness" (~2000) returns to the novel's theme, "the lethal power of media," now with "the locus of our self-annihilation … moved online" — Wallace himself carrying the death-by-media idea into an explicitly Internet setting. [¶ "Until I saw 'Wickedness'…" / "In its pages…"]
  • [inference] Max's framing: the videocartridge "even in 1996 … would have seemed a little dated," inviting the read that the Entertainment stands in for a medium Wallace had not yet named. [¶ "People frequently ask…"]
• Notes: Counterevidence is in-source and on record: Wallace explicitly rejected the "about the Web" reading — "This is sort of what it's like to be alive…. You don't have to be on the Internet for life to feel this way" — and said "he had never been online." Max grants Wallace's "Luddite stance" was "likely exaggerating … but not … by much" (the analogue notebook). So the block records a prescience reading advanced by critics and by the trajectory of Wallace's own later work, against the author's stated denial that the novel was internet-coded. Cite-as-written; the demurral is not a settled resolution.

Themes

Media and its lethal power (the Infinite Jest theme extended); the Internet, privacy, and shame (the "bathroom wall of the U.S. psyche"); irony and the "ogler" persona; the anhedonic/self-annihilating appetite the novel and the story share; Wallace's composition method (the analogue notebook, "freewriting").

Cross-references

• dtmax-2009-the-unfinished — D.T. Max's 2009 New Yorker profile; a different article by the same author (the seed of the biography), on Wallace's post-Infinite Jest struggle and The Pale King. This 2012 Page-Turner piece is a later, narrower archive dispatch on one unfinished story; do not conflate.
• dtmax-every-love-story — Max's 2012 biography, published the same season; this essay is a companion archive note to it.
• newsweek-walls-mixed-up-files — the other Pale King-boxes archive overview; both open the newly available holdings.
• The "lethal power of media" framing connects to the novel's Entertainment cruxes (its lethality and purpose, and the theories about what the film shows); the "Internet Site Owned by Russians" / foreign-government margin note echoes the A.F.R.'s weaponizing of the Entertainment (the Entertainment's dissemination). Noted as thematic kinship; "Wickedness" is a separate, unfinished text, not novel evidence.

Notable passages

• Max on the premise: Infinite Jest's plot "hinges on the whereabouts of a short movie so entertaining that it kills whoever watches it."
• Wallace, resisting the Web reading: "You don't have to be on the Internet for life to feel this way" — and "he had never been online."
• Max on "Wickedness": it returns to "the great theme of 'Infinite Jest': the lethal power of media. Only this time, he posits that the locus of our self-annihilation has moved online."
• Wallace on the Web, in "Wickedness": "what it really was was the bathroom wall of the U.S. psyche."
• The last-page margin note Wallace never developed: "Internet Site Owned by Russians."
• Wallace's working-margin notes: "I'm trying," and "Blankness is OK."