IJ study archive

VOCA / University of Arizona Poetry Center: Sonora Review tribute to David Foster Wallace (2009) — short montage excerpt

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TL;DR

A five-minute edited montage from the Arizona MFA program's tribute to its 1987 alumnus: panel voices interleaved to mark Wallace's student years and his editorship of Sonora Review, the journal that built a hundred-page tribute feature around his work — including a reprint of the uncollected story Solomon Silverfish. The excerpt's best material is institutional memory: Wallace as fiction editor of Sonora issues 11 and 12, the acceptance letter he sent a young submitter, and a first-reader's account of the Broom of the System manuscript landing as a gigantic, messy, wild rebuke to four-page minimalism. The excerpt advances no theories about Infinite Jest; one panel voice's claim that the novel judges no one is its lone interpretive note.

Key claims

  • The event: held at the Poetry Center's Helen S. Schaefer Building, co-sponsored by Sonora Review together with the Prose Reading Series; framed explicitly as a tribute to the work's continuing importance to American fiction rather than a mourning of the man. [00:00–00:01]
  • Arizona years: Wallace graduated from the University of Arizona MFA program in 1987; the program remembers his time as intense, important to his career, and marked by arriving already highly accomplished. [00:01]
  • Sonora Review editorship: he worked on at least two issues as fiction editor — issues 11 and 12; one panelist recalls submitting a story in 1985 and receiving, a week later, an acceptance letter and encouragement from Wallace through the mail slot — the rarest of birds. [00:02]
  • The tribute issue: the biannual journal, then in its thirtieth year, had just published a bound double issue with a roughly hundred-page tribute feature to which the panelists contributed — with a reprint of Solomon Silverfish contributed by a participant named Bonnie. [00:02–00:03]
  • The Broom first-reader account: one voice recalls opening an envelope containing a letter from David Wallace identifying himself as an Arizona MFA student, at a moment when minimalism — stories four pages long and tragic — ruled; the manuscript that followed was a gigantic, messy, wild book set in a great Ohio desert with crazily named characters, an homage to Pynchon and Barth and a Wittgensteinian inquiry into language, and it felt perfect — like a novel built out of the coordinate points of the reader's own head. [00:01–00:02]
  • Reception voices: his signature is being hellishly harrowing while hysterically funny in the same instant, not in alternation — the humor as dark as the darkness; reading him installs his voice in your head for days, a temporary acuity; he took on the hardest moral questions while being the smartest person in the room; and — the excerpt's one interpretive claim about the novel — the compassion of Infinite Jest, the way it judges no one, is remarkable, of a piece with what he says in This Is Water. [00:02–00:04]
  • The friendship voice: one speaker knew him from the Arizona years onward — visits to San Francisco, dinners with the speaker's parents in New York, the before-everyone-settled-down era — and frames the death as the loss of a good friend, not only an amazing writer. [00:04–00:05]

Themes

Reception and influence (the voice-in-your-head effect); compassion and nonjudgment in IJ; institutional memory of the apprentice years; the Broom-era break with minimalism.

Cross-references