The Wallace Effect

David Foster Wallace and the Contemporary Literary Imagination

Marshall Boswell

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781501344909
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781501344916
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The Wallace Effect explores David Foster Wallace's contested space at the forefront of 21st-century American fiction. Pioneering Wallace scholar Marshall Boswell does this by illuminating "The Wallace Effect"-the aura of literary competition that Wallace routinely summoned in his fiction and non-fiction and that continues to inform the reception of his work by his contemporaries.

A frankly combative writer, Wallace openly challenged his artistic predecessors as he sought to establish himself as the leading literary figure of the post-postmodern turn. Boswell challenges this portrait in two ways. First, he examines novels by Wallace's literary patriarchs and contemporaries that introduce innovations on traditional metafiction that Wallace would later claim as his own. Second, he explores four novels published after Wallace's ascendency that attempt to demythologize Wallace's persona and his literary preeminence.

By re-situating Wallace's work in a broader and more contentious literary arena, The Wallace Effect traces both the reach and the limits of Wallace's legacy.

PART ONE

Toward Wallace

1

Something Both and Neither

Marshes, Marriage, and the Fertile Invention of John Barth’s The Tidewater Tales

An unabashedly ambitious writer, one haunted, as A. O. Scott intuited, by “a feeling of belatedness,” David Foster Wallace signaled early on that he wished to join the pantheon of US postmodernist novelists, a group that includes Thomas Pynchon, William Gaddis, Don DeLillo, and John Barth (Scott 39). Yet he also wanted to move past those writers, to enact some advance on postmodern metafiction that would single him out as the most prominent figure in the movement, still unnamed, that would follow postmodernism. Of all his distinguished artistic precursors, Wallace chose John Barth as the one writer he would “take on” directly. As he famously admitted in 1993, “If I have a real enemy, a patriarch for my patricide, it’s probably Barth and Coover and Burroughs, even Nabokov and Pynchon” (Conversations 48). Wallace’s complaint with these writers focuses on their once innovative use of “self-consciousness and irony and archaism,” which, he argues, “served valuable purposes . . . for their time” but have now been absorbed “by U.S. commercial culture,” a process that “has had appalling consequences for writers and everyone else” (48). In Wallace’s depiction of his own artistic predicament, if he was going to move successfully past the hegemony of self-consciousness and irony, he would have to clear artistic space for himself—that is, commit an “artistic patricide.” Of the five writers he names as possible targets of this patricide, he reduced his murder victim to one, the first named. In the process, Wallace consciously elevated Barth into the embodiment of the brand of postmodernism his fiction would correct.

He committed this “patricide” in his 1989 novella “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way,” the concluding piece in his first story collection, Girl with Curious Hair. In the collection’s copyright page, Wallace reveals that parts of the novella “are written in the margins of John Barth’s ‘Lost in the Funhouse’ and Cynthia Ozick’s ‘Usurpation (Other People’s Stories)’” (vi). The story’s protagonist is an aspiring writer named Mark Nechtr who is enrolled in a graduate writing workshop taught by a one Professor Ambrose, author of the “big-deal story” “Lost in the Funhouse,” which a maverick adman named J. D. Steelritter plans to transform into a national franchise of actual funhouses (243). Ambrose Mensch is the name of Barth’s protagonist in “Lost in the Funhouse.” Nechtr, an archery champion whom the story’s narrator endows with “the kind of careless health so complete it’s sickening,” bears ambivalent feelings about his teacher (233). While he admits that Ambrose(/Barth) “exerts an enormous influence on [his] outlook,” Nechtr “does not trust him . . . Even when he doesn’t listen to [Ambrose], he’s consciously reacting against the option of listening, and listens for what not to listen to” (292–93). For all of that, the story declares Necthr to be “the boy who would inherit academic fiction’s orb and crown” and someone “hotly cocky enough to think he might someday inherit Ambrose’s bald crown and ballpoint scepter, to wish to try and sing to the next generation of the very same kids” (335, 348). Near the end of the novella, the narrator outlines a breakthrough story Nechtr will someday write in which he fictionalizes himself as an archery champion named Dave.

I have written about this piece at greater length elsewhere and so will not rehearse that reading here (see Understanding David Foster Wallace 102–15). Nevertheless, this brief outline of Wallace’s 150-page novella reveals the basic contours of the battle Wallace staged with his literary precursors. As Charles Harris and I have posited, Wallace conceived of his battle in terms of Harold Bloom’s 1973 volume, The Anxiety of Influence. In Bloom’s theory, aspiring poets—a term meant to include artistic writers more generally—create space for their own work by directly confronting the influence of their precursors. In the book’s introduction, Bloom explains, “Poetic history . . . is held to be indistinguishable from poetic influence, since strong poets make that history by misreading one another, so as to clear imaginative space for themselves” (5). Bloom goes onto identify his theory with Freud, suggesting thereby that the relationship between aspirants, or ephebes, and their stronger antecedents is essentially Oedipal, wherein the younger poet must overcome, and in effect kill, the father, resulting in what Wallace frankly identified as a “patricide.”

Although Wallace’s story graphs so perfectly onto Bloom’s theory so as to function as a deft parody of Bloom, this parodic strain does not diffuse Bloom’s importance to Wallace’s project. Rather, it enhances Wallace’s objectives. Whereas Bloom’s volume traces the battle of influence as a buried strain in poetic history that his readings disclose, Wallace, the belated writer who must work in the light of Bloom’s own disclosures, employs Bloom self-consciously in a matter reminiscent of metafictional self-consciousness, the very feature he most envies and resents in the work of his chosen patriarch, Barth. “Westward” parodies both Barthian metafiction and Bloomian anxiety, all the while retaining the valence of each influence. And just to make sure his readers understood what he was about here, Wallace confirmed his debt to Bloom in the pages of Infinite Jest (cited as IJ), where he titles an imagined motion picture after a line from the Gnostic Gospels that Bloom uses as the title of his own prologue—namely, “It Was a Great Marvel That They Were in the Father without Knowing Him” (Bloom 3, IJ 992, n24).

According to D. T. Max, Wallace’s biographer, Wallace had high hopes for “Westward.” In a letter to his friend, the novelist Jonathan Franzen, he declared, “In my view [the story is] far and away the best piece of sustained fiction I’ve ever written” (Max 98). Conversely, Max reports that Franzen, like “nearly all of Wallace’s friends, wondered why Wallace held ‘Westward’ in such special regard” (98). In any event, Wallace took the piece’s modest impact as an early artistic blow. Yet the relative failure of “Westward” should not have been surprising to him, given that all of its programmatic directives for a fiction designed for “the next generation of . . . sad kids” refer to work that has yet to be written. Even Nechtr’s breakthrough story is presented only in outline. Wallace himself would later argue that the story was more a ground-clearer than a stand-alone statement, an attempt to exhaust Barthian metafiction’s hold over him, to “get it over with, and then out of the rubble reaffirm the idea of art being a living transaction between humans” (Conversations 41).

Harris wryly notes that the novella has helped promote a “common narrative”—or, more properly, “a myth”—regarding Wallace’s relationship to Barth. In that myth, Harris explains, “Wallace fell under the influence of Barth and other postmodern writers, only to wrest himself free of this sinister authority as he matured as a writer, steering his own fiction away from its sway and becoming one of postmodern fiction’s strongest detractors” (“Anxiety” 103). But the situation is more complex than that. Harris, who also reads “Westward” as steeped in Harold Bloom’s “anxiety” model of artistic influence, suggests that the novella “is better understood as agonistic” rather than “antagonistic” in its relationship with Barth’s fiction (“Anxiety” 104). Harris and I both deem the novella a “self-consciously filial” misprision, that is, a deliberate misreading of Barth. One of Wallace’s most clear misreadings of Barth involves a telling absence. Wallace described the novella as “written in the margins of John Barth’s ‘Lost in the Funhouse,’” which is accurate enough, and yet that laser focus on Barth’s late 1960s work has also invited Wallace’s many champions to ignore the work Barth was producing at the same time that Wallace was leveling his critique. For although, as Harris shows, Wallace wants to introduce his own work as “a fulfillment of the putatively unrealized possibilities of Barth’s fiction and postmodern fiction in general,” Barth’s fiction of the late 1980s was already fulfilling many of the possibilities Wallace wanted to claim as his own. Specifically, his 1987 novel, The Tidewater Tales deftly embodies many of the qualities Wallace felt Barth’s fiction lacked and which his own fiction would amend. What’s more, Wallace’s own writing of the period vividly betrays his familiarity with the novels his critique pointedly ignores.

In “Westward,” Wallace argues that Barth’s metafiction is essentially solipsistic and narcissistic. In making this critique, he takes direct aim at one of Barth’s most distinctive tropes, the equation of storytelling with sex, a motif most spelled out in his 1972 novella collection Chimera. In Barth’s early conception of the model, the male author joins with the passive female reader, here figured as Dunyazade, sister of the Arabian Nights’ Scheherazade, in a playful act of storytelling coitus. Barth himself assumes the role of a twentieth-century genie named Djean who travels back in time to the world of the Arabian Nights. Barth’s genie double insists that the “teller’s role . . . is essentially masculine, the listener’s or reader’s feminine, and the tale was the medium of their intercourse” (34). The genie goes on to explain that this erotic storytelling model was “potentially fertile for both partners . . . for it goes beyond male and female. The reader is likely to find herself pregnant with new images . . .; but the storyteller may find himself pregnant too” (34).

In “Westward,” Wallace charges Barth’s brand of postmodern metafiction as “untrue, as a lover” because “it can only reveal. Itself is its only object. It’s the act of a lonely solipsist’s self-love . . . It’s lovers not being lovers. Kissing their own spine. Fucking themselves” (332). Furthermore, Wallace complains that “the poor lucky reader’s not that scene’s target” (332). The reader stands outside the text, watching it run through its self-reflexive contortions but remaining unengaged, unaroused. Conversely, Wallace wants to amend Barth’s model by reprising and repurposing the “Funhouse” motif from the story collection that preceded Chimera. In Wallace’s new conception of the postmodern text, the story itself would not be a funhouse, as in Barth’s work, but rather would reside within a funhouse, where it waits to be discovered by a reader, here figured as “a lover.” He goes on to urge, “Make the reader a lover, who wants to be inside. Then do him. Pretend the whole thing’s like love” (331). Wallace’s ideal postmodern text would “use metafiction as a bright smiling disguise” but still be directed at the reader rather than itself (333). It would be both self-reflexive and other directed.

What Wallace deliberately conceals is the fact that Barth was already obliquely addressing Wallace’s critiques, even as Wallace was committing his patricide. Tidewater Tales not only anticipates Wallace’s suggestion that Barth’s erotic storytelling motif be amended to invite the lover into the narrative but also addresses and seeks to correct the inherent sexism of the model itself. What’s more, the novel, in conjunction with its prequel Sabbatical (1982), signals Barth’s pivot from the hyper-self-reflexive work of his first major phase, which concludes with his 1979 summative work LETTERS, to a new, outwardly focused metafiction, a shift identified by Thomas Carmichael as “a return to the discourse of the realistic enterprise” in Barth’s corpus, a shift that Carmichael insists marks a decisive event in our “understanding of the course of the postmodern impulse in American culture” (329–30). The Barth Wallace was killing off had already been abandoned—by Barth himself.

It also does not do to suggest that Wallace was unfamiliar with the work his critique elides. For one thing, the format of “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way” betrays a debt to Tidewater Tales. Throughout the novella, Wallace interrupts the narrative with bold-face section headings that run the gamut from one-line clauses—that is, “How They Know Each Other” (251)—to paragraph-long sentences that fill half the page (288). The format appears to be a nod to Tidewater Tales’ playful section breaks, which also interrupt the text, comment upon it, and range from one-word interruptions to, in one case, a single sentence that runs for a page and a half and introduces a “section” that consists of a single word, “Ahem” (73).¹ “Here and There,” a story included in Girl with Curious Hair alongside “Westward,” features an innovative narrative point of view in which a young man and young woman narrate together the story of their doomed relationship, a dual, multigendered storytelling strategy that appears to owe a debt to Tidewater Tales’ unique narrative point of view, which was in fact first introduced in Sabbatical, and which Barth has described as “the first person-duple voice of a well-coupled couple” (Sabbatical 3).²

Admittedly, these echoes are largely cosmetic. Nevertheless, they provide clues to Wallace’s larger purpose in choosing Barth as the target of his patricide. As Harris points out, Wallace was “probably aware” of these “elisions” but made them deliberately “to clear space for his own effort to extend and deepen the ethical dimensions in postmodern fiction” (107). Hence, the purpose of this essay is not to chastise Wallace for dishonesty. Rather, this essay seeks to give proper due to Tidewater Tales for correcting some of the excesses and errors of Barth’s own tradition and telegraphing a number of tropes and advances that Wallace would work very hard to claim as largely his own.

About two-thirds of the way through The Tidewater Tales, Peter Sagamore, one-half of the husband-and-wife team who jointly narrates the action, finds himself in a precarious erotic predicament. While taking a naked ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• David Foster Wallace Studies
• Title Page
• Contents
• Series Editor’s Introduction
• Introduction
• PART ONE Toward Wallace
• PART TWO The Wallace Effect
• Conclusion: Love and Cruelty
• Acknowledgments
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright Page