IJ study archive

A Voyeur in the Archives

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TL;DR

A 2012 Open Letters Monthly personal essay by Max Ross recounting a road trip from New York to the Harry Ransom Center to read the David Foster Wallace papers. Its spine is a confession about the "scummy voyeuristic" nature of poring over a dead writer's private books and letters, but along the way it is one of the richest firsthand descriptions of the archive's contents in circulation, and it carries primary evidence on several Wallace-influence and aesthetic questions: Wallace's inscribed, spine-split copy of Barth's Lost in the Funhouse (with his marginal verdict on it and its role as the "nemesis" behind Westward); a copy of DeLillo's White Noise with nearly every paragraph underlined and the filial-toned DeLillo correspondence; the annotated self-help book Compassion and Self-Hate and Ross's meditation on whether Wallace read it for himself or for research; and the draft-and-notebook genesis of the "Joseph Frank's Dostoevsky" essay, where Wallace articulates the moral-fiction-against-irony program that Infinite Jest enacts. It brings firsthand archival evidence to two long-argued influence questions (Barth and DeLillo) and supplies leads on the sincerity program and the research-versus-autobiography question.

Key claims

  • The voyeurism thesis: Ross confesses the trip's motive is "the wholly known and fiercely unacknowledged" fact that "we wouldn't have traveled to Texas if Wallace hadn't killed himself"; the honest account of reading the archive is that "there's a scummy voyeuristic component to it all", a wish to "uncover secrets about Wallace and his exact brand of sadness", and, studying his underlinings and marginalia, a sense of being "here to try and see the interior of his brain" given that "his thoughts ultimately led to his suicide".
  • The acquisition history: the Ransom Center "first tried to acquire the David Foster Wallace archive in 2006", when director Thomas F. Staley wrote to Wallace and "inquired about his papers and challenged him to a tennis match" — a letter that "went unanswered"; after Wallace's death Staley wrote to his agent and the acquisition was announced March 2010. The collection holds "over three-hundred books from Wallace's library, early drafts and galleys of nearly everything he published," notebooks, journals, correspondence, and juvenilia.
  • The Barth copy: Wallace's paperback 1969 Bantam Lost in the Funhouse, its spine "split from overuse" (and "split exactly to the title story"), carries a handwritten inscription on the inside cover — "This is art - concerned less with explanation than transfiguration, less with escape than the modality of perspective" — and Wallace's marginal verdict on the title story: "Talmudic - obsessed with its own interpretation". Ross frames "Funhouse" as "a reference point and nemesis - a Virgil and a Mephistopheles - for Wallace's own involuted story about writing," Westward the Course of Empire Makes Its Way, which he reads as Wallace's attempt to steer postmodern self-reference "back to the simpler maze of plot and warm, complicated characters".
  • The DeLillo copy and letters: "nearly every paragraph of DeLillo's White Noise was underlined"; the DeLillo correspondence is "advice-seeking, favor-seeking, and comically respectful," so that "in certain missives he wondered explicitly if he were looking for approval" (a 10/10/95 letter: "Maybe I want a pep-talk"). In an October 1999 letter Wallace admits he is "not working well. You have not asked but I inform you", and — relaying Jonathan Franzen's mother's death — crosses out his own reflexive "and stuff," which Ross reads as "the human Wallace is struggling against the writer Wallace to give the circumstance its proper gravity."
  • The self-help book: Compassion and Self-Hate: An Alternative to Despair by Dr. Theodore Rubin was dog-eared and underlined (though unannotated), one underscored line reading "Minimizing and ignoring one's abilities are no less self hating than exaggerating one's abilities." Ross wonders whether Wallace read it for himself or "was exploring the effects of depression generally, the same way he explored tax law for The Pale King" — leaving the research-versus-autobiography question deliberately open, and pointing readers to Maria Bustillos's Awl essay on the self-help library.
  • The Dostoevsky essay's genesis: on Ross's desk were the notebook and typed drafts of "Joseph Frank's Dostoevsky." An early sentence, "It's easy to see Dostoevsky as a bearded titan," is struck through ("bearded titan" lined out, "stet" then written above) and rebuilt across drafts into the published "sepia-tinted canonical author" version — Ross's example of how "it's the revising that makes Wallace's work pop and glow." The notebook's faith-and-seriousness worry ("Frank helps me see none of the 1990s is new... Dostoevski has balls") resolves in the essay into the demand for "morally passionate, passionately moral fiction" that "was also ingenious and radiantly human fiction".

Theories & evidence

THEORY: Barth's "Lost in the Funhouse" is the metafictional father Wallace answered and exited through "Westward" to clear ground for his own fiction

  • Crux: barth-influence
  • Stance: advances
  • Evidence:
    • [draft] Wallace's own paperback Lost in the Funhouse, spine "split from overuse" and "split exactly to the title story," carries his inside-cover inscription and his marginal verdict on the title story: "Talmudic - obsessed with its own interpretation" — firsthand archival evidence of intense, critical engagement. [¶ Library section]
    • [secondary] Ross frames "Funhouse" as "a reference point and nemesis - a Virgil and a Mephistopheles - for Wallace's own involuted story about writing," Westward, read as steering postmodernism "back to the simpler maze of plot and warm, complicated characters." [¶ Library section]
  • Notes: A firsthand-marginalia sighting that complements Wallace's own spoken account (to Lipsky) of Westward as a "patricidal killing thing to Barth" and "fawning homage": where Lipsky has the spoken account, Ross has the physical annotated book. What Westward itself argues is a separate question (westward-anti-entertainment); this block records only the influence relationship. No counter-position raised.

THEORY: DeLillo is the mentor-figure whose influence marks Infinite Jest

  • Crux: delillo-influence
  • Stance: endorses
  • Evidence:
    • [draft] In Wallace's library copy, "nearly every paragraph of DeLillo's White Noise was underlined" — the DeLillo novel E Unibus Pluram itself quotes, marked as intensively read. [¶ Library section]
    • [author] The DeLillo letters are "advice-seeking... comically respectful," with Wallace wondering "explicitly if he were looking for approval" ("Maybe I want a pep-talk," 10/10/95) and admitting he is "not working well" (Oct 1999) — the filial/mentor relation the crux names. [¶ Library II section]
  • Notes: Corroborates the Bloomian mentor/father reading of the DeLillo relationship (the critical account of DeLillo as the "Father-Law" Wallace answered) and the New Statesman report of IJ notes jotted in the margins of Wallace's DeLillo books. Ross reads the letters biographically, not as an IJ argument; logged as influence evidence, with IJ-derivativeness not claimed by this source.

Themes

Anxiety of influence and literary inheritance (Barth as nemesis, DeLillo as mentor); the ethics of the archive and posthumous voyeurism (reading a dead man's private marginalia to find his "brand of sadness"); depression, research, and autobiography (the self-help book and the open question of why Wallace owned it); the labour of revision and self-translation (the Dostoevsky-essay drafts as thought becoming more exact); and Wallace's moral-fiction-against-irony aesthetic (the sincerity program the Dostoevsky notebook articulates).

Cross-references

Notable passages

  • The voyeurism confession: "there's a scummy voyeuristic component to it all", and "we wouldn't have traveled to Texas if Wallace hadn't killed himself."
  • The Barth inscription: "This is art - concerned less with explanation than transfiguration, less with escape than the modality of perspective".
  • Wallace's marginal verdict on "Funhouse": "Talmudic - obsessed with its own interpretation."
  • On DeLillo: "nearly every paragraph of DeLillo's White Noise was underlined."
  • Wallace to DeLillo, Oct 1999: "not working well. You have not asked but I inform you."
  • The underscored self-help line: "Minimizing and ignoring one's abilities are no less self hating than exaggerating one's abilities."
  • The Dostoevsky-essay revision: "It's easy to see Dostoevsky as a bearded titan" — struck through and rebuilt across drafts.
  • The moral-fiction demand: "morally passionate, passionately moral fiction" that "was also ingenious and radiantly human fiction".

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