IJ study archive

Archived Soul

source

TL;DR

A 2011 Texas Observer personal essay by Justine Tal Goldberg on a curated tour of the Harry Ransom Center's David Foster Wallace archive (with curator Molly Schwartzburg). Its refrain is confessed incomprehension — "I've never understood David Foster Wallace" — resolved into the archive's portrait of an exacting, self-doubting craftsman. For Infinite Jest it carries one crux-relevant thread: Goldberg stages Michiko Kakutani's 1996 charge that IJ is "a vast, encyclopedic compendium of whatever seems to have crossed [his] mind" against Wallace's own (Lipsky-recorded) horror at exactly that misreading — his "great dark terror" that the novel would look like undesigned thought-dump — using the archive's obsessive proof-editing as evidence for deliberate design. It also records the Pale King notes in Wallace's annotated crime paperback, the eerie "Author is feeling suicidal" proof note on Everything and More, and (shared with the Foster and Ross archive pieces) the curator's warning against the illusion of knowing a writer through his papers.

Key claims

  • The archive: the Ransom Center acquired Wallace's papers in early 2010; the collection holds "42 boxes of research, notes and draft manuscripts", teaching materials, juvenilia, and "302 books from Wallace's personal library" — over 20,000 items. Goldberg tours the collections with curator Molly Schwartzburg.
  • Wallace as reader: his library shows an "intimate, unprejudiced" relation to books (a Mary Higgins Clark mystery beside Kant); as Ransom librarian Jacqueline Muñoz puts it, "He didn't just read these books. He digested them". He used books to record movie quotes, liked words, even driving directions.
  • Pale King genesis in a crime paperback: Wallace's tattered copy of James Crumley's The Last Good Kiss is heavily annotated — "notes throughout the book on what appears to be plot and character development for The Pale King," on some pages so dense the printed text is indecipherable.
  • The exacting editor: on proofs of his 1996 Tennis Magazine essay Wallace makes "obsessive comments," asking that "headquarters" print as "HQ" and "often reject[ing] changes that are all about very small visual characteristics of the piece" — "He's extraordinarily concerned with all of that". On Everything and More the frustration escalates (per archivist Stephen Cooper) to "huge exclamation points" and, eerily, a proof note: "Please fix this. Author is feeling suicidal".
  • Against Kakutani (the IJ thread): Goldberg cites Kakutani's New York Times review faulting IJ as "a vast, encyclopedic compendium of whatever seems to have crossed [his] mind", then quotes Wallace's 1996 response to Lipsky — the idea that the novel was "just every thought I seemed to have for three years put down on the page" "made my bowels turn to ice", because that was "the great dark terror when I was writing it" — reading it as proof of Wallace's exacting, "often-paralyzing self-doubt," not random accumulation.
  • The illusion of closeness: among the private material Goldberg finds a childhood poem ("My mother works so hard so hard and for bread..."), an Oblivion-draft margin note ("I feel awful w/o nicotine," then "ANGRY"), and a tender gloss on a Carver story. But Schwartzburg warns the intimacy is a trap: "It's dangerous to believe that you know the person by knowing the materials," and with Wallace "there's even more danger of that." Goldberg's close: the archive shows "many" selves, "much more than 42 document boxes and 302 volumes can hold".

Theories & evidence

THEORY: Infinite Jest's encyclopedic sprawl is deliberate, exacting design — not the random thought-dump Kakutani's review implied

  • Crux: encyclopedic-design
  • Stance: endorses
  • Evidence:
    • [author] Wallace's 1996 response to Lipsky: the notion that IJ was "just every thought I seemed to have for three years put down on the page" "made my bowels turn to ice", because that possibility was "the great dark terror when I was writing it" — i.e. undesignedness was the thing he worked against. [¶ Kakutani section]
    • [draft] The archive's obsessive proof-editing (house-style rejections, the "HQ" insistence, "He's extraordinarily concerned with all of that"; the escalating Everything and More corrections) as material evidence of an exacting method. [¶ tennis / Everything-and-More sections]
    • [secondary] Goldberg reads all this as testimony to Wallace's "exacting tendencies" and "often-paralyzing self-doubt." [¶ Kakutani section]
  • Notes: The in-source counter-position is Kakutani's charge itself — IJ as "a vast, encyclopedic compendium of whatever seems to have crossed [his] mind" — recorded as she wrote it; Goldberg takes the deliberate-design side by rebutting the charge with Wallace's own words. The evidence here bears on the deliberate-versus-random axis of that dispute (was the sprawl designed?), not on the further claim that IJ bids for the encyclopedic-novel canon.

Themes

The craft and self-doubt of composition (the exacting editor, the "paralyzing" fear of looking undesigned); depression and suicide (the "Author is feeling suicidal" proof note; the childhood-to-adulthood darkness); the ethics and limits of the archive (the seductive, resisted "illusion of closeness"); and the reader's relation to a dead, admired author.

Cross-references

Notable passages

  • Ransom librarian Jacqueline Muñoz: "He didn't just read these books. He digested them".
  • Kakutani's charge: IJ is "a vast, encyclopedic compendium of whatever seems to have crossed [his] mind".
  • Wallace to Lipsky, 1996: the thought that IJ was "just every thought I seemed to have for three years put down on the page" "made my bowels turn to ice", because that was "the great dark terror when I was writing it".
  • The Everything and More proof note (via Stephen Cooper): "Please fix this. Author is feeling suicidal".
  • Curator Schwartzburg's warning: "It's dangerous to believe that you know the person by knowing the materials".
  • The childhood poem: "My mother works so hard so hard and for bread...".

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