The Panic of Influence

TL;DR

The single most influential general-interest assessment of David Foster Wallace before the academy took over — A. O. Scott's 2000 New York Review of Books essay, pegged to Brief Interviews with Hideous Men but ranging across the whole career and treating Infinite Jest at length. Scott reframes Wallace's whole project through Harold Bloom's "anxiety of influence", dialed up to panic: Wallace's fraught relation to his postmodern fathers (Barth, Pynchon, DeLillo) drives the metafictional loop that "E Unibus Pluram" tries and fails to escape. On Infinite Jest his verdict is the famous double edge — "it works; it works too damn hard": the Pynchonesque machinery is "willed and secondhand" and the corporate/entertainment satire is "familiar bromides", but the addiction and depression material yields "some genuine illumination", and the novel's real subject is not television but dependency as such — "all-encompassing, self-renewing need is the organizing principle of contemporary culture". Scott's Wallace is not anti-ironic but "meta-ironic", running the "feedback loop of irony and sincerity", and the piece ends undecided on whether the work is a critique of the culture of narcissism or its most florid symptom ("there can only be one answer: it’s both"). The keystone of the archive's pre-academic reception layer, and the piece with which Adam Kelly would later suggest second-wave Wallace criticism "might be said to begin".

Key claims

• Panic, not just anxiety, of influence. Wallace's ambivalence toward the "R&D" (research-and-development) postmodernists shows the "classic symptoms of what Harold Bloom has called the anxiety of influence"; "anxiety may not be a strong enough word; panic is more like it." Scott quotes Wallace's own admission — "If I have a real enemy," he once told an interviewer, "a patriarch for my patricide, it’s probably Barth and Coover and Burroughs, even Nabokov and Pynchon."
• Westward as the trap, EUP as the failed cure. "Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way" is a "virtuoso compendium of tried and true avant-garde techniques" Wallace later disavowed ("a permanent migraine"); "E Unibus Pluram" is his "most rigorous attempt to cure his aesthetic headache", arguing that television has turned postmodernism's irony "from an attitude of dissent into a mode of oppression." Scott quotes the essay's "anti-rebels" / "single-entendre principles" peroration in full, including "Too sincere. Clearly repressed. Backward, quaint, naïve, anachronistic."
• EUP's weaknesses as criticism. Scott faults the essay: its account of television is "maddening in its blithe, judgmental generality" ("at long last, sir, the medium is not the message"), and it "accepts... a rather melodramatic account of the impact of R&D fiction". He credits its foresight (Seinfeld; the Jedediah Purdy "New Realism" backlash) even so.
• Meta-ironic, not anti-ironic. "Wallace, then, is less anti-ironic than (forgive me) meta-ironic": he turns "irony back on itself", wanting to be "at once earnest and ironical", committed to the Lynch-derived quality of "both ness". "Janus-faced, he demands to be taken at face value."
• Infinite Jest: it works too damn hard. The verdict — "In the case of Infinite Jest... the answer is yes, it works; it works too damn hard." The Pynchonesque elements (O.N.A.N., the terrorists, Incandenza) "feel rather willed and secondhand" and the satire is "familiar bromides decked out in gaudy comic dress"; but the Hal and Gately plotlines yield "some genuine illumination".
• Dependency, not television, is the real subject. The strongest parts show that Wallace's EUP observation about media is "less interesting as a statement about television than as a statement about dependency as such." The novel's "most serious and sustained conceit is that all-encompassing, self-renewing need is the organizing principle of contemporary culture". Scott quotes the nameless character's marijuana-binge plan ("He’d cure himself by excess.") and reads it as an allegory of Wallace's own addiction to "irony, metafiction, and the other cheap postmodern highs."
• Post-postmodernism as a form of realism. A handful of the newer stories show "that meta-metafiction, or post-postmodernism, or whatever you want to call it, is a form of realism after all": "The feedback loop of irony and sincerity... turns out not to be an artifact of literary R&D, but a fact of human nature". The hideous men's confessed dishonesty is a strategy that makes them "appear, ultimately, sincere" — "The most important thing is sincerity. If you can fake that, you’vegot it made." (OCR artifact "you’vegot" preserved)
• The culture of narcissism. "The Depressed Person" is "the most brilliant dissection I have seen of what Christopher Lasch once called “the banality of pseudo-self-awareness.”" — evidence that "we still inhabit a culture of narcissism." Scott's closing question — is Wallace's work "an unusually trenchant critique of that culture or one of its most florid and exotic symptoms?" — answers itself: "it’s both."

Theories & evidence

THEORY: "E Unibus Pluram"'s thesis — that television has co-opted postmodern irony and turned it from dissent into oppression, requiring new "single-entendre" sincerity — is persuasive as mood-diagnosis but weak as cultural history

• Crux: eup-connection
• Stance: complicates
• Evidence:
  • [author] The essay's argument, block-quoted by Scott: irony was "downright socially useful" in the best postmodern fiction until television neutered it, so the coming "anti-rebels" will be ones "who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching" and "who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles" — accepting the jibes "Too sincere. Clearly repressed. Backward, quaint, naïve, anachronistic." [sec. 1]
  • [inference] Scott's critique: the television argument is "maddening in its blithe, judgmental generality", and the essay "accepts... a rather melodramatic account of the impact of R&D fiction". [sec. 1]
  • [inference] The counterweight (grants force): Scott credits EUP's foresight about "a certain knowing, allusive, world-weary superciliousness" (Seinfeld) and the "defiantly plainspoken sensibility ranged against it" (Purdy's New Realism). [sec. 1]
• Notes: A major early eup-connection sighting — Scott engages the EUP program more fully than most reviewers and lands on complicates (grants the mood-diagnosis, disputes the cultural-history framing). In-source tension recorded: he reads Wallace as unable to actually escape the aura EUP diagnoses ("Are his harangues against the tyranny of irony meant to be taken in earnest, or are they artfully constructed simulacra...? Or both?").

THEORY: Infinite Jest's real subject is not the lethal Entertainment or television but dependency-as-such — need is the organizing principle of contemporary culture, the film only its limit case

• Crux: entertainment-lethality
• Stance: complicates
• Evidence:
  • [text] The nameless character's marijuana-binge plan (the "He’d cure himself by excess." passage), quoted by Scott as the novel's strongest register — an "insane and deliberately unpleasant" self-modification regimen. [sec. 2]
  • [inference] "The strongest parts of Infinite Jest suggest that this observation is less interesting as a statement about television than as a statement about dependency as such"; the novel's "most serious and sustained conceit is that all-encompassing, self-renewing need is the organizing principle of contemporary culture". [sec. 2]
  • [inference] Against the sci-fi framing: the Entertainment-as-lethal-cartridge and the corporate satire are "familiar bromides decked out in gaudy comic dress" — the dependency insight, not the MacGuffin, is what lands. [sec. 2]
• Notes: Endorses the CONTINUITY axis of entertainment-lethality (the film as the asymptote of ordinary addictive culture, not a magical exception) while dismissing the device's sci-fi trappings — hence complicates. Convergent in substance with the EUP-asymptote reading held under eup-connection sec. 6.2, but Scott relocates the weight from the film to dependency in general. No in-source denial of the dependency reading; the pushback is aimed at the satirical machinery around it.

THEORY: Wallace is meta-ironic rather than anti-ironic — his project runs an irreducible feedback loop of irony and sincerity, so it is at once a critique of the culture of narcissism and a symptom of it

• Crux: cynicism-naivete
• Stance: entertains
• Evidence:
  • [inference] "Wallace, then, is less anti-ironic than (forgive me) meta-ironic": he turns "irony back on itself," wanting to be "at once earnest and ironical"; the Lynch-derived "both ness." [sec. 1]
  • [inference] "The feedback loop of irony and sincerity which animates so much of Wallace’s writing turns out not to be an artifact of literary R&D, but a fact of human nature". [sec. 2]
  • [inference] The closing undecidability: critique of "a culture of narcissism" or "one of its most florid and exotic symptoms"? — "there can only be one answer: it’s both". [sec. 2]
• Notes: Bears on the cynicism-naivete axis (Wallace's refusal to settle between cynicism and naïveté; the "both" verdict). Scott holds it at arm's length — the "meta-ironic" reading is offered as diagnosis, and he is pointedly unsure whether the bothness is a genuine synthesis or a way to "short-circuit criticism". Recorded as entertains, with that self-cancelling suspicion as the in-source counterweight.

Themes

Reception and reputation (the pre-academic career assessment; the considered successor-piece to the 1996 review wave); influence and belatedness (Bloom's anxiety of influence as "panic"; Pynchon, Barth, DeLillo; the "quasi-Oedipal hostility"); irony and sincerity (EUP; meta-irony; single-entendre principles; the feedback loop); entertainment and addiction (dependency as the organizing principle; the Entertainment as limit case); depression and narcissism ("The Depressed Person"; Lasch's culture of narcissism); form and metafiction (Westward; the endnotes; post-postmodernism as realism).

Cross-references

• The keystone of the archive's pre-academic reception layer, downstream of the 1996 reviews Kakutani and Peck: all three invoke the Pynchon/anxiety-of-influence frame, but Scott's 2000 assessment is the most sustained and the one the academy picked up.
• Named by Kelly's "Death of the Author and the Birth of a Discipline" as the piece with which the "second wave" of Wallace scholarship "might be said to begin" — Kelly's hedged conditional, and the single most load-bearing lineage link in this cluster.
• The EUP engagement pairs with e-unibus-pluram-ij-connections and the sincerity/irony strand (kelly-dialectic-of-sincerity), which quotes the same EUP anti-rebels passage from the essay itself.
• The dependency-as-organizing-principle reading is a general-press precursor to the scholarly addiction thesis: hf-addiction-to-itself-thesis, hf-daverman-limits-of-the-infinite-aa.
• The Pynchon-derivative charge is the (more nuanced) cousin of Peck's blunter version in peck-well-duh-1996; like Peck's, it routes as intertext texture, not a dedicated slug.

Notable passages

Verbatim from the essay (Scott's own prose unless marked; this raw uses curly quotes and apostrophes, reproduced byte-exact; a few spans carry OCR line-break artifacts).

• Influence: the "classic symptoms of what Harold Bloom has called the anxiety of influence" — of which Wallace "has a bad case: anxiety may not be a strong enough word; panic is more like it."
• Wallace, quoted: "a patriarch for my patricide, it’s probably Barth and Coover and Burroughs, even Nabokov and Pynchon."
• The verdict: "it works; it works too damn hard."
• The satire: "familiar bromides decked out in gaudy comic dress."
• The real subject: "all-encompassing, self-renewing need is the organizing principle of contemporary culture".
• Dependency over television: the observation is "less interesting as a statement about television than as a statement about dependency as such."
• Meta-irony: "Wallace, then, is less anti-ironic than (forgive me) meta-ironic."
• The loop: "The feedback loop of irony and sincerity which animates so much of Wallace’s writing".
• Sincerity as strategy: "The most important thing is sincerity. If you can fake that, you’vegot it made." (OCR artifact "you’vegot")
• Narcissism: "the banality of pseudo-self-awareness"; "a culture of narcissism."