David Foster Wallace and Imagining Moral Fiction

TL;DR

A short theoretical essay (HTMLGiant, 2010) arguing that Wallace's aesthetic is inseparable from an ethics — that "moral fiction," for Wallace, is a gift the writer offers the reader, an act of love and self-sacrifice sent "into the infinite" without expectation of return. Its touchstones are "The Planet Trillaphon" (Wallace's first published story) and the Oblivion stories, not Infinite Jest, which appears only as a stylistic reference point. Its value is as a compact statement of the "New Sincerity" / moral-fiction reading of Wallace's whole project.

Key claims

• The consistency claim. "David Foster Wallace was never doing anything wrong": even the first story, "The Planet Trillaphon as It Stands in Relation to the Bad Thing" (1984), "bears most of his stylistic earmarks circa Infinite Jest" and grapples with the themes that would recur — "infinity, fear, the risk of autobiography, fiction as an event, the struggle to empathize".
• Aesthetics as ethics. Niedenthal's core: "When we talk about style, language, form, we are already talking about ethics, about politics. There is no such thing as a work of art for-itself." The writer bears "the power and duty to transform," and is "deeply and inescapably responsible."
• The unanswered call-to-arms. "As such, it's surprising to me that his call-to-arms has never really caught fire in any significant way": Niedenthal faults the field's split between "language-based and ethical literature."
• Fiction as gift. Wallace's ethical/aesthetic theory "is a call for the writer, and not the reader, to answer" — the writer must "inaugurate my work as an event, as a total and moral truth," send it out knowing "my gift can never be returned"; this self-sacrifice "results in the affection for the reader which, for Wallace, behooves all writers. By another name, one might call it love."
• Content matters as much as form. Against the experimentalist reflex to privilege how something is said, Niedenthal argues "since content and form are deeply interlinked and in play, perhaps it matters just as much what you say as how you say it" — which is why, for him, the bare-sentence Good Old Neon is "more effective and resonant than" the more baroque The Suffering Channel.

Theories & evidence

THEORY: Wallace's fiction is a moral project — an ethics of the gift, in which style is already an ethical act and the work is offered to the reader as love without expectation of return

• Crux: sincerity-definition
• Stance: endorses
• Evidence:
  • [author] Wallace's stated care for the reader and his late doubt about his own style's effectiveness, which Niedenthal reads as the ground of the gift-ethic. [sec. opening]
  • [inference] Niedenthal's own argument (via Blanchot, Plato) that "There is no such thing as a work of art for-itself" and that fiction sent "into the infinite" as an unreturnable gift is Wallace's "love." [sec. middle]
• Notes: Oeuvre-scoped, not IJ-specific. Exhibits are "Trillaphon," Good Old Neon, The Suffering Channel — no Infinite Jest passage is cited, so no scene mapping.

Themes

Moral/ethical fiction; sincerity and the reader; the gift and self-sacrifice; aesthetics-as-ethics; content vs. form. These are the aesthetic-program concerns that underlie the archive's This-Is-Water and sincerity material without Niedenthal engaging Infinite Jest directly.

Cross-references

• ismail-consciousness-oblivion and parker-real-question-good-old-neon — the Good Old Neon readings this essay's argument leans on; all three treat the story as the clearest instance of Wallace's connect-with-the-reader aim.
• The new-sincerity/moral-fiction reading pairs with the archive's sincerity and AA-as-antidote material (offered as oeuvre framing, not an IJ claim).

Notable passages

• "When we talk about style, language, form, we are already talking about ethics, about politics. There is no such thing as a work of art for-itself."
• On the gift: "the affection for the reader which, for Wallace, behooves all writers. By another name, one might call it love."
• "David Foster Wallace was never doing anything wrong."