In Which We Explore The Archives Of David Foster Wallace

TL;DR

A 2011 first-person account, by writer-filmmaker Jesse Klein, of a week spent reading the David Foster Wallace papers at the Harry Ransom Center soon after they opened to the public. It is one of the fullest published walk-throughs of the archive's texture — the thirty-four boxes, the handwriting, the self-lacerating marginalia — and it is mostly an emotional appreciation rather than a scholarly study, framed as "celebrat[ing] the intentional fallacy" by sitting with a beloved writer's private pages. For Infinite Jest readers its value is a handful of concrete genesis data points it is almost alone in carrying: a "Heard At Meetings" page of transcribed Alcoholics Anonymous sayings that Klein reports Wallace recopied into an Infinite Jest notebook in December 1992; an early notebook note on telephone psychology that reads as the germ of the novel's videophony material; and, from the Good Old Neon drafts, a bracketed marginal line about ghosts and misrecognized inner voices. It advances no interpretive theory scoped to a novel crux — its interpretive work is biographical and compositional — but it supplies rare primary archival testimony about how the novel was built and about the ghost-voice device that runs through Wallace's work.

Key claims

• The Ransom Center holds "thirty-four densely packed boxes" that Wallace's widow Karen Green and his family preserved wholesale — travel documents, college homework, childhood drawings and poems, and early drafts of articles, essays, stories, and novels. Klein spent a week reading them (one box at a time, HB pencil only, no ink allowed).
• The Pale King (Box 26): dozens of pages of handwritten prose, opening with a first-person section titled "Fierce Infant"; at the top of the first page the word "FREEWRITING" with an arrow to "potential title for piece," and two pages later the self-cancelling note "freewriting - means nothing" beside "dead prose." Three folders of accounting homework (Wallace took undergraduate Accounting courses from 1998 on); a graded quiz with the aside "David Wallace (Patty - can I just see how I did? I won't normally ask you to grade me J)." He got 10/10. His correspondence with an academic and with a CFO (Stephen Lacy) about tax-code noncompliance thresholds and the hardest sentence in the tax code.
• The editorial-ferocity file: Klein reproduces Wallace's conditions of submission to his magazine editors, including, on the Kafka piece for Harper's, "I will find a way to harm you or cause you suffering if you fuck with the mechanics of the piece", footnoted "Think of me as a spider with a phenomenal emotional memory. Ask Charis."
• Infinite Jest as the lived-toward book: Klein frames IJ as the book Wallace "lived to write," gathering his standing preoccupations (addiction, tennis, terrorism, TV, prescription drugs, religion, depression): "Wallace researched the material that populates the book for years".
• The AA notes (Box 15): "much of Infinite Jest takes place within the sacred circle of AA meetings", and Klein reports a page titled "Heard At Meetings" on which Wallace transcribed overheard lines from early-'90s Boston meetings — among them "They say it's good for the soul, but I feel nothing inside that you could call a soul." Klein's genesis claim: "This last quote was recopied into an Infinite Jest notebook in December '92."
• The telephone-psychology note: in a notebook of the same period Klein records the entry "Audio phone conversations both let you presume the other person was paying complete attention to you and let you not have to pay complete attention to them", with an arrow to "Nixon/Kennedy debates of 1960" — Klein reads it as Wallace's brain drawing a line "from phony phone conversations to the way television betrayed Nixon's coolness".
• The suicide undertone (Box 15): a loose yellow-legal-pad sheet reading "I don't think it's an accident that people that shoot themselves shoot themselves in the head", which Klein presents as the archive's ever-present darkness.
• Good Old Neon drafts (Box 24): the first handwritten draft is headed "FRAUD"; across pen-color passes ("blue to black to red to green") an "analyst" gains "a small ginger mustache," and the aside "(I know this part is boring and probably boring you, but it gets a lot more interesting after I kill myself)" — which survives to the published story — appears. Over the story's ending Wallace boxed the note "incoherent, but moving"; the last line on that page, set in brackets, is "Ghosts talking to us all the time--but we think their voices are our own thoughts."
• The late notebooks (Box 31): a 70-page "Midwesternisms" notebook of verbal tics; a "Good names" list ("Tova," "Pat Rexroat," "Elpidia Carter"); and a spiral-notebook page dated 7/31/96 — six months after IJ's release and acclaim — reading "The thing is I get scared it won't come. I'm back to thinking IJ was a fluke", followed by a Goethe commitment epigraph and a handwritten "What balance would look like" regimen (2-3 hours writing a day, daily exercise, "5 AA/week").

Theories & evidence

The essay advances no interpretive theory scoped to a plot or interpretation crux; its interpretive work is biographical and compositional. The single block below records the one place its archival testimony bears directly on a question readers argue about; its value is the draft evidence itself, not an argument the source makes.

THEORY: Wallace's ghosts dramatize voice-possession — we mistake other voices for our own thoughts

• Crux: ghost-voice-possession
• Stance: mentions
• Evidence:
  • [draft] The closing line of the Good Old Neon first draft, boxed in Wallace's hand, reads "Ghosts talking to us all the time--but we think their voices are our own thoughts" — the voice-possession device stated programmatically in a draft margin. [¶ Good-Old-Neon paras]
• Notes: The source discusses Good Old Neon (Oblivion, 2004), not Infinite Jest, and draws no connection to IJ's wraith; the line is logged here as a corpus-wide [draft] datum for Wallace's voice-possession device (a device traceable across his work), not as evidence for the wraith's in-text ontology in IJ. In IJ the same device is dramatized by the wraith inserting words into Gately's mind (scene 169, 175). No stance is taken by the source on the wraith-reality crux.

Themes

Composition and genesis (the archive as the record of how the books were built, IJ's AA material sourced from transcribed meeting-talk); addiction and recovery (the Boston AA note-taking, the "5 AA/week" regimen); depression and suicide (the yellow-pad note, the Good Old Neon drafts, the read-back of the archive as suffused with its author's death); the writing life and self-doubt (the "freewriting - means nothing" and "IJ was a fluke" marginalia); and the fan's relation to a dead author (the archive as a way of "spending time with a person you love and admire, though you don't know").

Cross-references

• riles-in-dfw-archive-part1 and debraski-ij-cuts — the other firsthand archive walk-throughs; the first matches IJ typescript pages to print, this essay records the notebook/AA-note substrate underneath them.
• bdcwire-dfw-boston — corroborates the Boston-AA research account from a different source (Wallace's own 1996 statement that Boston's open AA meetings let him sit in and take notes); this essay supplies the archival product of that note-taking, the "Heard At Meetings" page.
• dtmax-every-love-story — the biography that draws on the same papers; the shared source for the recovery chronology and the Boston years.
• oblivion-good-old-neon — the digested story whose drafts this essay describes (the "FRAUD" header, the boxed "incoherent, but moving," the ghosts-and-inner-voices close).
• In the novel: scene 047 (videophony, pp. 144-151, the passage the telephone-psychology note prefigures); scene 074 (the White Flag AA meeting, pp. 343-367, the world the "Heard At Meetings" page feeds); scenes 169 and 175 (the wraith's word-insertion into Gately, pp. 883-896 and 916-934).

Notable passages

• On the archive's occasion: the University of Texas at Austin and the Harry Ransom Center "acquired David Foster Wallace's archives and later that year made them publicly available."
• The yellow-pad note: "I don't think it's an accident that people that shoot themselves shoot themselves in the head."
• The telephone-psychology entry: "Audio phone conversations both let you presume the other person was paying complete attention to you and let you not have to pay complete attention to them."
• From "Heard At Meetings": "They say it's good for the soul, but I feel nothing inside that you could call a soul." — which, Klein reports, "was recopied into an Infinite Jest notebook in December '92."
• The 7/31/96 journal: "The thing is I get scared it won't come. I'm back to thinking IJ was a fluke."
• The Good Old Neon draft close: "Ghosts talking to us all the time--but we think their voices are our own thoughts."
• On editing: "I will find a way to harm you or cause you suffering if you fuck with the mechanics of the piece", footnoted "Think of me as a spider with a phenomenal emotional memory. Ask Charis."