«L'Infinie Comédie»: pourquoi il faut lire David Foster Wallace

TL;DR

Slate.fr's long 2015 essay on why France was the last major market to receive Infinite Jest — twenty years after publication, as L'Infinie Comédie (Éditions de l'Olivier, trans. Francis Kerline). Part publishing history, part reception analysis, it argues the delay was cultural, not merely commercial: the 1990s French milieu — in publisher Olivier Cohen's words, a generation "complètement bloqués sur le roman français" — could not see entertainment as a novelistic subject or tolerate Wallace's genre-mixing. It then tells the mummy's curse of the book's French rights — Marion Mazauric's Diable Vauvert acquired Wallace around 2000 and lost Infinite Jest through a cascade of misfortune before Cohen's L'Olivier finally published it. Its densest passages are a French translation (by Charles Recoursé) of Wallace's own letter defending the endnotes to his editor, and the concrete datum that the original runs 577,608 words.

Key claims

• A cultural refusal, not just a financial one. When agent Anna Jarota shopped the manuscript in the late 1990s, every French publisher refused it; she remained, fifteen years on, stunned — «J’étais stupéfaite parce que c’est un chef d’œuvre.» The essay's thesis: French literary culture of the era, still committed to classicism and the psychological roman français, had no room for a novel whose subject Wallace himself summarized as entertainment ("le divertissement") — a subject the milieu did not consider novelistic.
• What Wallace was doing (per his French translator Recoursé). "Le but de Wallace, c’était de parler de ce que ça fait de vivre dans une époque où il n’y a plus de sens unificateur dans le monde, où les relations sociales se disloquent, où on est noyé d’informations" (our translation: Wallace's aim was to talk about what it is like to live in an era with no unifying meaning left in the world, where social relations come apart, where we drown in information) — a project at odds with a French tradition centered on "le sentiment amoureux".
• The mummy's curse. Mazauric discovered the novel via proof sheets around 2000, bought the Wallace rights, but a chain of accidents (a wrecked knee and long convalescence, a rights-management software failure, un-produced royalty statements) cost her the Infinite Jest rights in spring 2011 — "je reçois une lettre me disant que les droits d’ Infinite Jest me sont retirés". The essay calls the book "un peu la momie de Toutânkhamon de l’édition française".
• L'Olivier and Cohen's conversion. Cohen had disliked Wallace's first novel and skipped Infinite Jest; pushed by Franzen and Eugenides, he finally read it — "J’ai fini par obéir. Et j’ai pris la claque de ma vie en le lisant." — and concluded: "Ce qui est génial dans Infinite Jest, c’est que c’est une expérience littéraire lisible. Wallace a réussi à capter le son de toute une génération."
• Recoursé's path. The young translator did Wallace's earlier books (La Fonction du Balai / Broom, La fille aux cheveux étranges, Le Roi pâle) and, after L'Olivier gave Infinite Jest itself to the more experienced Kerline, was brought back to translate the endnotes — three people at L'Olivier worked to homogenize the text.
• Wallace's own defense of the endnotes (in Recoursé's French). The essay reproduces a letter in which Wallace justifies moving text into endnotes to his editor: "Je me suis extrêmement attaché à cette stratégie, et je me battrai bec et ongles pour la défendre," a five-point rationale that includes a discursive authorial voice "ss faire du Finnegan," imitating "le flux d'informations et le triage de données," and forcing the reader's back-and-forth, ending "Je vous assure que ça n'a rien à voir avec de l'hypertexte, mais ça me semble intéressant, et c'est le meilleur moyen d'obtenir l'arc scénaristique que je vise." Marked "(Citation gracieusement traduite par Charles Recoursé.)"
• A hard datum. In a footnote on the labour of translation, the essay states: "La version originale d’ Infinite Jest en fait 577.608." (words — French dot-thousands notation).

Theories & evidence

THEORY: Wallace's endnotes are a deliberate structural strategy, not ornament or hypertext — they let him keep a discursive authorial voice, mimic modern information-overload and data-triage, and force the reader's physical back-and-forth, in service of the narrative arc he wanted

• Crux: endnotes-function
• Stance: advances
• Evidence:
  • [author] Wallace's letter to his editor, in Recoursé's French translation: "Je me suis extrêmement attaché à cette stratégie, et je me battrai bec et ongles pour la défendre." [sec. La momie, endnote-letter block]
  • [author] The rationale: a discursive authorial style "ss faire du Finnegan"; "imiter le flux d'informations et le triage de données qui, je pense, tiendra une place encore plus importante dans la vie des Américains d'ici 15 ans"; and "Je vous assure que ça n'a rien à voir avec de l'hypertexte, mais ça me semble intéressant, et c'est le meilleur moyen d'obtenir l'arc scénaristique que je vise." [sec. same]
• Notes: This is a French rendering (by Recoursé) of the SAME Wallace endnote-defense letter the archive already holds in English (the "w/o Finneganizing the story" / "mimic the information-flood and data-triage" / "I pray this is nothing like hypertext" rationale attested via D.T. Max). Recorded here as a CONVERGENT foreign-language carrier, tagged [author] but flagged as translation-of-original (French rendering of the English letter); the English is canonical for verbatim, the French is the reception artifact. NOT new evidence — a second-language witness to an existing author datum. One rendering variance: the French opens the hypertext sentence "Je vous assure" (our translation: I assure you) where the held English reads "I pray" — recorded, not resolved. The essay independently states the endnotes began as in-body passages moved out to shorten a frightening manuscript — also convergent with the held account.

THEORY: Infinite Jest is a readable literary experiment that captured the sound of a generation — its difficulty does not make it hermetic

• Crux: designed-holes
• Stance: mentions
• Evidence:
  • [secondary] Cohen: "Ce qui est génial dans Infinite Jest, c’est que c’est une expérience littéraire lisible. Wallace a réussi à capter le son de toute une génération." [sec. La momie]
• Notes: A publisher's reception claim (the difficult book is nonetheless readable), recorded as a mentions-grade sighting on the design/difficulty axis; no argument about the gaps or the ending. Kept light — this is reception praise, not an interpretive theory of the book's structure. Could equally be filed as pure reception texture; keyed loosely to designed-holes for the difficulty-vs-accessibility dimension only.

Themes

Translation and publishing history (the twenty-year French delay; the mummy's-curse saga of the rights); reception (the écrivain maudit, the readability paradox, the generational capture); the endnotes as structure (Wallace's own five-point defense); entertainment as the novel's theme and its unacceptability to 1990s French letters; Wallace's depression and death (the Nardil cessation, the 12 September 2008 news) — biography, handled sober.

Cross-references

• The celebratory companion to the critical Kerline review L'infinie comédie et la tâche ingrate du traducteur: Slate.fr tells the saga and praises readability; Spirale reviews the translation and faults Kerline's over-domestication. The French-reception pair.
• The compressed English version of this French story (Cohen, the écrivain maudit, the 20,000 first-four-months sales) appears in Esposito's Infinite Jest Around the World.
• The endnote-defense letter is the same letter D.T. Max quotes in English in The Unfinished; the Slate.fr version is its French reception artifact.

Notable passages

French verbatim (guillemets « », curly ’ in the essay's own prose, straight apostrophes in Recoursé's translated quote, accents and œ preserved). English in reader prose is our translation, not a quotation.

• Jarota: «J’étais stupéfaite parce que c’est un chef d’œuvre.»
• Cohen: "Ce qui est génial dans Infinite Jest, c’est que c’est une expérience littéraire lisible. Wallace a réussi à capter le son de toute une génération."
• Wallace on the endnotes (Recoursé's French): "Je me suis extrêmement attaché à cette stratégie, et je me battrai bec et ongles pour la défendre."
• "Je vous assure que ça n'a rien à voir avec de l'hypertexte, mais ça me semble intéressant, et c'est le meilleur moyen d'obtenir l'arc scénaristique que je vise."
• "Infinite Jest, c’est un peu la momie de Toutânkhamon de l’édition française."
• "La version originale d’ Infinite Jest en fait 577.608."