The Fight: Considering David Foster Wallace Considering You

TL;DR

A memorial essay in Rain Taxi's Winter 2008/2009 online edition, written in the months after Wallace's September 2008 death by Tim Jacobs — the critic whose 2003 dissertation gave Infinite Jest one of its earliest book-length readings. Jacobs refuses the obituary conventions and instead reads Wallace's whole career through a single thesis: love, "A generosity of spirit," was his prime mover, and his signature achievement was "to co-opt metafictions recursive involuted style and redeploy it outward in the service of the reader" (the archived text lost its apostrophes; quotations reproduce its spelling exactly). Not an Infinite Jest-specific piece — its close readings are of "Good Old Neon," "Octet," "Westward," and "Everything Is Green" — but it declares the novel "the greatest novel since The Recognitions" and threads it in twice: the ONAN naming as onanistic solipsism, and Hal's childhood tennis-sign memory as mediation made visible.

Key claims

• The valedictory frame: Jacobs refuses the obituary conventions — he will not "talk about his life, depression, or end" and will not catalogue the suicides in the fiction — but contends that "David Foster Wallace was the most important American writer since William Gaddis, and Infinite Jest the greatest novel since The Recognitions."
• Love as prime mover: Wallace's greatest strength "was simply that he loved"; writing is a "vital relationship" of trust in which the reader's effort "cant be for your benefit; its got to be for hers" [sic]. The 1993 Larry McCaffery interview (Review of Contemporary Fiction) is read as the fullest articulation: great writing "emerges from the more generous side of the writer, the side that loves instead of the side that selfishly craves love."
• The Augustine key: "Tense Present" leads with Augustine's Dilige et quod vis fac ("Love, and do what you will"), which Jacobs makes "the key to all of Wallaces work" [sic] — stern medicine on usage or the culture wars is licensed only if first motivated by love, else "the whole enterprise becomes solipsistic, masturbatory, onanistic."
• The ONAN gloss: the thread to Infinite Jest is drawn explicitly: "It is no accident that Wallaces conception of the newly formed North American nations in Infinite Jest uses the acronym ONAN, after that first biblical seed-spiller" [sic] — self-directed creation as sterile self-love.
• Metafiction redeployed outward: Wallace called recursive metafiction "a permanent migraine" and "cleveritis," and "he saw it as toxically solipsistic because its terminal point is the writer" [sic]; his achievement was to turn the same techniques outward. He made his work "smart and tricky and complex but also vastly entertaining" so that fiction could do its job of "making us feel less alone through imaginative access to other selves". "Good Old Neon," "Octet," and "Westward" are read as staging metafiction's problems while using its techniques to break the reader out of the solipsistic cocoon — "were all marooned in our own skulls" [sic], as Wallace put it.
• "Everything Is Green" as exemplar: the two-page story from Girl with Curious Hair is offered as the purest case — a heavily mediated free-indirect rendering of two inarticulate lovers whose shared perception of the green ("they see the same green"; "no solipsistic color fallacy") models the escape from solipsism into mutual understanding through language.
• The Infinite Jest tennis sign: Jacobs connects the story's visual cue (Mitch's "cannot" rendered as "can not") to Hal Incandenza's late recollection of a childhood church announcement-board reading LIFE IS LIKE TENNIS THOSE WHO SERVE BEST USUALLY WIN, "with the letters all spaced far out like that" — "another moment of highlighted mediation that quietly acknowledges that the character self-consciously understands that the reader sees the text" (scene 179).
• Jacobs also recalls Wallace's 2001 Rain Taxi review of The Best of the Prose Poem: after eviscerating much of the anthology, Wallace personally paid for an ad in Rain Taxi promoting one of the poets he admired, Jon Davis — offered as Augustine's precept in practice.
• The essay closes with a pastiche paragraph assembled almost entirely from Wallace's own lines, footnote-sourced to This Is Water, "Octet," "Tense Present," the McCaffery interview, Infinite Jest, "Good Old Neon," "Westward," and "E Unibus Pluram."

Theories & evidence

THEORY: Wallace's signature move — co-opting metafiction's recursive style and redeploying it outward in the reader's service — makes sincerity, not irony, the ground of his aesthetic

• Crux: irony-vs-recovery
• Stance: endorses
• Evidence:
  • [secondary] The McCaffery interview read as the aesthetic manifesto: great writing "emerges from the more generous side of the writer, the side that loves instead of the side that selfishly craves love"; "the agenda of the consciousness behind the text" is what separates good art from so-so art [epigraph + sec. McCaffery]
  • [secondary] Wallace's own verdicts on recursive metafiction — "a permanent migraine," "cleveritis," "toxically solipsistic because its terminal point is the writer" [sic] — as the position the outward redeployment answers [sec. metafiction]
  • [secondary] "Good Old Neon," "Octet," and "Westward" read as diagnosing metafiction's problems while using its techniques so the reader feels a mediating human presence — "someone--some presence--is talking to you" [sec. close readings]
• Notes: In-source counterweight: Jacobs concedes the Augustine epigraph is "a bit pretentious" and that a good descriptivist may find Wallace's work "showy and tedious" — he grants the objection before overriding it. The reading is career-wide and aesthetic rather than scoped to a plot crux; Infinite Jest figures as one instance among the shorter fiction.

THEORY: Infinite Jest enacts the E Unibus Pluram program — anti-irony fiction that foregrounds its own mediation to reach the reader rather than aggrandize the writer

• Crux: eup-connection
• Stance: endorses
• Evidence:
  • [text] The ONAN naming glossed as deliberate onanism-as-solipsism: "It is no accident that Wallaces conception of the newly formed North American nations in Infinite Jest uses the acronym ONAN, after that first biblical seed-spiller" [sic] [sec. Augustine/ONAN]
  • [text] Hal's childhood tennis-sign memory — LIFE IS LIKE TENNIS THOSE WHO SERVE BEST USUALLY WIN, "with the letters all spaced far out like that" — read as "another moment of highlighted mediation that quietly acknowledges that the character self-consciously understands that the reader sees the text" (scene 179) [sec. Everything Is Green reading]
  • [secondary] The closing pastiche's footnote names "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction" among the Wallace texts it assembles, tying the memorial's whole frame to that essay [closing footnote]
• Notes: A corroborating reading rather than a new argument — the E-Unibus-Pluram aesthetic is assumed and illustrated across the career, not argued from the novel's text; hence endorses, not advances. No in-source pushback beyond the "bit pretentious"/"showy and tedious" concession recorded above.

Themes

Irony and sincerity (metafiction redeployed outward); communication and solipsism ("were all marooned in our own skulls" [sic], the mediating voice, "Everything Is Green"); love and generosity as aesthetic ground; onanism (the ONAN figure) as the polity's solipsism; entertainment — Wallace's insistence that difficulty be made pleasurable. Addiction and depression are deliberately set aside by the author.

Cross-references

• jacobs-eschatological-imagination — the same critic's 2003 dissertation on the novel; this memorial distills, in eulogy register, the reader-directed aesthetic that study elaborates at length.
• Scene 179 (pp. 941-958) — Hal's memory of the Weston church announcement-board, the novel passage Jacobs quotes.
• splitsider-roberson-dfw-comedy-nerd — makes the same irony-to-sincerity turn through comedy theory; a direct counterpart in the appreciation register.
• The McCaffery-interview aesthetic and the E-Unibus-Pluram irony/sincerity argument that the wider reception commentary leans on for Wallace's own design statements — see kelly-dialectic-of-sincerity for the scholarly elaboration.

Notable passages

The archived text of this essay lost its apostrophes in capture; quotations reproduce that spelling exactly.

• "David Foster Wallace was the most important American writer since William Gaddis, and Infinite Jest the greatest novel since The Recognitions." (Jacobs)
• "It is no accident that Wallaces conception of the newly formed North American nations in Infinite Jest uses the acronym ONAN, after that first biblical seed-spiller." (Jacobs)
• "One thing that Wallace did incredibly well was to co-opt metafictions recursive involuted style and redeploy it outward in the service of the reader." (Jacobs)
• "he saw it as toxically solipsistic because its terminal point is the writer" (Jacobs, on recursive metafiction, "cleveritis")
• "It maybe has to do with having the discipline to talk out of the part of yourself that can love instead of the part that just wants to be loved" (Wallace to McCaffery, 1993, as quoted by Jacobs)
• "If anyone is unwilling to descend into himself, because this is too painful, he will remain superficial in his writing" (Wittgenstein, as quoted by Jacobs)