IJ study archive

Reading Wallace Reading

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TL;DR

Mike Miley's 2014 Smart Set essay recounts his Mellon-funded 2011 residency at the Harry Ransom Center reading the annotated books of David Foster Wallace's personal library — above all Wallace's copy of Don DeLillo's End Zone, whose inside cover carries the gloss "SILENCE = HORROR." Its findings are the fullest published census of Wallace's self-identifying marginalia: the initials "DFW" or "DW" appear twenty-one times in seventeen books, nearly always beside passages about the failure to create or about acutely self-conscious mental states, and Miley reads the choice between the two sets of initials as Wallace distinguishing his page-bound persona ("DFW") from the living person ("DW"). The essay doubles as a meditation on fandom and over-identification — "there is such a thing as reading too closely" — and carries one first-order compositional datum: Wallace owned a copy of On Writer's Block whose margin holds his own note about the double bind of writing after Infinite Jest. It advances no theory scoped to a novel crux; its interpretive work is biographical and persona-critical.

Key claims

  • The Wallace archive at the HRC holds, along with manuscripts and correspondence, "about 300 books from his personal library, 250 of which contain copious annotations in Wallace's miniscule handwriting."
  • The End Zone gloss: opening Wallace's copy of DeLillo's End Zone, the first annotation Miley met was "SILENCE = HORROR." (A reader comment appended to the article objects that in a filmed interview Wallace uses the phrase for the horror felt by non-readers.)
  • The initials census: "Wallace's initials appear twenty-one times in seventeen books," and "nearly every "DFW" or "DW" in Wallace's archive appears next to a passage about creating, or, more precisely, the failure to create"; the rest sit beside "withering descriptions of imbalanced, acutely self-conscious mental states".
  • The exemplary find: beside a Great Jones Street passage about wanting "To become the least of what I was", Wallace underlined the whole passage: "Then he drew a line down the margin. Then he wrote these three letters: "DFW." And then he underlined them. Twice."
  • DFW vs. DW: to Wallace, "DFW" stood for "his writerly persona that existed only on the page, apart from the living-and-breathing Dave Wallace." In a postcard to DeLillo, Wallace explains "Foster' is my middle name, foisted on me as part of my N.d.P. by my agent in 1985", adding "he said there was already a David Wallace.' I was 23 and would have called myself Seymour Butts if he'd told me to", and comparing seeing his full name in print to Lee Harvey Oswald in Libra. Miley reads "DW"-marked passages (Fussell's Muscle, Stone's Dog Soldiers, Kaufmann on alienation) as the person, "DFW"-marked ones as the persona.
  • The Laing parallel: in his copy of R.D. Laing's The Divided Self, beside a case study for whom "the loss of an argument would jeopardize his existence," Wallace wrote that this would be "Like DFW's loss of ability to write fiction." Miley's gloss: "He had to be "DFW" or he was no one at all."
  • Writer's block and the post-IJ double bind: "one of his books in the HRC library is On Writer's Block" — owned by the author of the "600,000-word maximalist opus Infinite Jest" — and in its margins Wallace wrote: "style-self perjury nicotine trip double bind re: IJ [Infinite Jest] -- want both to guarantee similar reaction and to avoid being repetitive, derivative of self." Letters to DeLillo confirm the struggle: "his envy of writers like William T. Vollmann and Joyce Carol Oates," the question "Do you have like a daily writing routine?", the complaint that "it's frustrating to feel that I'm getting mature and more disciplined in some areas of adult life and yet still seem a slave to my moods and emotions when it comes to work", and the "sad manically charming and loquacious letters" from blocked young writers who "regard me as some paragon of steady drive and discipline".
  • Doxiades marginal note: beside an Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture passage about a genius feeling "his great gift … deserting him", Wallace wrote "DW; Self-pity; Faint:-(."
  • Miley's cautionary thesis: the annotations show Wallace "reading too closely," seeking validation in books that only "wound up reinforcing his worst tendencies"; Miley turns the lens on fandom itself — "there is such a thing as reading too closely" — and elects to keep the "Saint Dave" myth rather than live with the private Wallace he glimpsed.

Theories & evidence

THEORY: "David Foster Wallace" was a constructed page-bound persona, distinct from and oppressive to the living Dave Wallace

  • Crux: nonfiction-persona
  • Stance: advances
  • Evidence:
    • [draft] The marginalia census: initials twenty-one times in seventeen books, "DFW" chosen for passages about arrested creativity, "DW" for passages about the person — a systematic, self-aware split in Wallace's own hand. [essay body]
    • [author] The DeLillo postcard: "Foster" was "foisted on me as part of my N.d.P. by my agent in 1985"; seeing the full name in print made him feel like Oswald in Libra. [postcard excerpt]
    • [author] The Laing margin note "Like DFW's loss of ability to write fiction" — the persona named as the thing whose failure threatens existence. [Laing copy]
    • [secondary] The Pale King's "nom de plume" satire cited as the same discomfort surfacing in fiction. [essay body]
  • Notes: The familiar question about Wallace's crafted authorial persona usually concerns the essays' narrator-construct; this extends it to the name itself, on primary marginalia evidence. In-source caution: Miley concedes the whole project is a fan's over-reading by design ("fandom is always about the fan") and one identification — the "SILENCE = HORROR" reading — is disputed in an appended reader comment citing Wallace's own on-camera explanation. Biography, not a claim about the novel's plot.

Themes

The author's self-image and depression (self-loathing, the gift as antagonist); writing and creative fear (writer's block, the post-IJ double bind); persona versus person (the "DFW"/"DW" split; irony-sincerity adjacent); fandom and reception (over-identification, "Saint Dave," the ethics of reading a dead writer's margins); the archive itself as a biographical instrument.

Cross-references

  • theawl-bustillos-self-help-library — the other major reading of the same HRC personal-library shelf (Bustillos 2011, the self-help books since withdrawn); Miley's census (300 books, 250 annotated) updates Bustillos's "three hundred-odd"; the two essays are the archive's paired marginalia witnesses.
  • dtmax-every-love-story — the biography's account of the post-IJ block years and the DeLillo correspondence; Miley quotes the letters directly from the archive.
  • cafoscari-comparative-reading-ij-2021 — den Dulk cites Laing's The Divided Self (via Burn) in reading Hal; Miley documents Wallace owning and self-applying the same book — a primary-source anchor for the Laing thread in Hal criticism.
  • michod-world-according-to-dfw-archive — Nadell's account of how the papers (and library) reached UT-Austin.
  • The readings of Hal as an author-surrogate — the self-identifying marginalia is adjacent evidence for them, though Miley never mentions Hal.

Notable passages

  • The End Zone inside-cover gloss: "SILENCE = HORROR."
  • The census: "Wallace's initials appear twenty-one times in seventeen books," and nearly every "DFW" or "DW" in the archive sits beside "a passage about creating, or, more precisely, the failure to create".
  • The Great Jones Street find: "Then he drew a line down the margin. Then he wrote these three letters: "DFW." And then he underlined them. Twice."
  • Wallace to DeLillo: "`Foster' is my middle name, foisted on me as part of my N.d.P. by my agent in 1985"; "I was 23 and would have called myself Seymour Butts if he'd told me to."
  • The Laing margin: "Like DFW's loss of ability to write fiction."
  • The On Writer's Block margin: "style-self perjury nicotine trip double bind re: IJ [Infinite Jest] -- want both to guarantee similar reaction and to avoid being repetitive, derivative of self."
  • Wallace to DeLillo, on the blocked young writers' letters: "they regard me as some paragon of steady drive and discipline".
  • Miley's verdict: "there is such a thing as reading too closely."

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