IJ study archive

Infinite Mess: David Foster Wallace's Archive

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TL;DR

One of the earliest David Foster Wallace archive pieces (March 2010), written for Phawker when the University of Texas had only just acquired the papers and fans could see nothing but "tiny pdfs on UT's website." Under a comic pseudonym, the AP writer JoAnn Loviglio previews the collection's texture — the circled-word dictionary, the marked-up personal library, the Hallmark-store sticky notes on an Infinite Jest revision — and folds in a reproduced memorial appreciation and a reproduced block of Wallace's own addiction autobiography. For Infinite Jest it carries one specific influence datum (Wallace's copy of DeLillo's Ratner's Star marked as "direct inspiration" for IJ themes and characters) and, via the reproduced bio, primary testimony on the lived roots of the novel's addiction/recovery material. Its own register is affectionate reception; the DeLillo and autobiography threads are its evidentiary contribution.

Key claims

  • The occasion: UT-Austin has "acquired the entire DFW archive" — handwritten IJ drafts, childhood poems, the personal library — with only low-resolution pdfs viewable online until the fall-2010 public opening; Pale King materials to be added after that book's April 2011 release.
  • The circled-word dictionary: the archive holds "a large dog-eared dictionary with words circled, one for each letter" — the piece samples "Abulia. Benthos. Cete. Uxorious. Valgus. Witenagemot" and notes "Dave never got to X, Y and Z" reading the word-hoard as sounding "like how he wrote."
  • The marked-up library: it includes "heavily marked up copies of books by his friend and idol Don DeLillo", Cormac McCarthy, and — to the scholars' bafflement — Mary Higgins Clark. Scribbles in his Rabbit, Run ("sad smelling"; an all-caps "RABBIT MOURNS HIMSELF") prefigure the irritation of his 1997 New York Observer piece calling Updike a "literary phallocrat."
  • DeLillo's Ratner's Star → Infinite Jest: the scribbles inside Wallace's copy of DeLillo's 1976 novel Ratner's Star show "that it provided direct inspiration for themes and characters that would wind up in Infinite Jest."
  • The Hallmark sticky notes: "the most touching piece of the archive" shown so far is "the sticky notes he used for an IJ revision that" "look like they came from the Hallmark store" — purple post-its with lame wacky cartoon characters saying "I told you this would happen!!" marking the pages ("Brilliant and banal," the writer's verdict). Seeing the archive, the writer says, "looking at it makes his death real in a way it wasn't before."
  • The reproduced memorial: a separately introduced, first-person appreciation calls Wallace "the most influential and innovative fiction stylist of his generation" and relays (with agreement) a New York Times comparison of the literary community's shock at his 2008 suicide to the rock world's at Kurt Cobain's.
  • The reproduced DFW addiction autobiography: a block of Wallace's own words, prefaced by the observation that "certain myths about both addiction and halfway houses die hard", recounts that in Boston in 1989, "I was, at age 27, a late-stage alcoholic and drug addict" — detoxes, rehabs, locked psych wards, "at least one serious suicide attempt," using heavily "since age fifteen," and the addict's bind of loving the substances "as in the sort of love where you'll do anything".

Theories & evidence

THEORY: DeLillo directly shaped Infinite Jest — Ratner's Star fed its themes and characters

  • Crux: delillo-influence
  • Stance: endorses
  • Evidence:
    • [draft] The scribbles in Wallace's copy of DeLillo's Ratner's Star (1976) show "that it provided direct inspiration for themes and characters that would wind up in Infinite Jest"; the library also holds "heavily marked up copies of books by his friend and idol Don DeLillo". [¶ library section]
  • Notes: A specific, named archival datum (Ratner's Star, not just DeLillo generally), complementing the archive's other delillo-influence sightings — the Foster/New Statesman IJ-margin-notes report, the Ross White Noise underlining, and chambers' Bloomian frame. The claim of "direct inspiration" is the previewer's reading of the marginalia, from an early low-resolution look; it strengthens rather than re-opens the crux. No counter-position raised.

THEORY: Infinite Jest's addiction/recovery world has lived autobiographical roots — while Wallace resisted the direct autobiographical reading

  • Crux: ij-autobiographical
  • Stance: complicates
  • Evidence:
    • [author] The reproduced Wallace statement, prefaced against "myths about both addiction and halfway houses" that "die hard", admits the lived reality ("I was, at age 27, a late-stage alcoholic and drug addict"; detoxes, rehabs, a suicide attempt) while framing the disclosure as correcting readers' mythologizing — granting the biographical substrate, resisting the one-to-one mapping. [¶ MORE / reproduced-bio block]
  • Notes: This is a reproduced DFW autobiographical passage in a memorial frame, not an argument the Phawker piece makes about IJ; recorded cite-as-written as [author] testimony on the addiction material's lived roots. It bears on the degree IJ's Ennet House / recovery world is autobiographical — a tension the quote itself stages ("die hard" myths vs the admitted bio).

Themes

Genesis and influence (DeLillo's Ratner's Star behind IJ; the marked-up library); the writing mind as word-hoarder (the circled dictionary "like how he wrote"); addiction and recovery and their autobiographical roots (the reproduced bio); grief and canonization (the memorial's Cobain comparison, the archive making "his death real"); and the fan's ambivalent intimacy with a dead author's private papers.

Cross-references

Notable passages

  • On the circled dictionary: "a large dog-eared dictionary with words circled, one for each letter" — "Abulia. Benthos. Cete. Uxorious. Valgus. Witenagemot".
  • On DeLillo: the Ratner's Star scribbles show "that it provided direct inspiration for themes and characters that would wind up in Infinite Jest".
  • On the sticky notes: "the sticky notes he used for an IJ revision that" "look like they came from the Hallmark store".
  • On the archive's effect: "looking at it makes his death real in a way it wasn't before".
  • Wallace, reproduced: "certain myths about both addiction and halfway houses die hard"; "I was, at age 27, a late-stage alcoholic and drug addict".
  • The memorial's estimate: "the most influential and innovative fiction stylist of his generation".

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