David Foster Wallace and “The Long Thing”: New Essays on the Novels

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Of the twelve books David Foster Wallace published both during his lifetime and posthumously, only three were novels. Nevertheless, Wallace always thought of himself primarily as a novelist. From his college years at Amherst, when he wrote his first novel as part of a creative honors thesis, to his final days, Wallace was buried in a novel project, which he often referred to as “the Long Thing.” Meanwhile, the short stories and journalistic assignments he worked on during those years he characterized as “playing hooky from a certain Larger Thing.” Wallace was also a specific kind of novelist, devoted to producing a specific kind of novel, namely the omnivorous, culture-consuming “encyclopedic” novel, as described in 1976 by Edward Mendelson in a ground-breaking essay on Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. David Foster Wallace and “The Long Thing” is a state-of-the art guide through Wallace's three major works, including the generation-defining Infinite Jest. These essays provide fresh new readings of each of Wallace's novels as well as thematic essays that trace out patterns and connections across the three works. Most importantly, the collection includes six chapters on Wallace's unfinished novel, The Pale King, which will prove to be foundational for future scholars of this important text. Cover HalfTitle Title Copyright Contents Preface: David Foster Wallace and “The Long Thing” Abbreviations Part One Wallace as Novelist 1 David Foster Wallace and the Novel of Ideas Dialogic dialogue Broom logic Infinite politics Pale history Novel ideas 2 Wallace and Empathy: A Narrative Approach The Victorian connection Infinite Jest, naturalization, and unnatural narration The Pale King and the overdetermined text 3 Boredom, Irony, and Anxiety: Wallace and the Kierkegaardian View of the Self The existentialist view of the self in Kierkegaard and Wallace Irony in the aesthetic and the ethical life-view Boredom, anxiety, and meaningful life 4 Modeling Community and Narrative in Infinite Jest and The Pale King Model#1: Contracted realism in The Pale King Community organizing and model#2: Jargony Argot in Infinite Jest Model#3: Spontaneous data intrusion in The Pale King Model#4: The Free Indirect Wraith in Infinite Jest Somewhere beyond the right frame Part Two The Novels 5 “Then Out of the Rubble”: David Foster Wallace’s Early Fiction Gardening the machine The threat of the text, ironic apocalypse 6 Representing Entertainment in Infinite Jest 7 Encyclopedic Novels and the Cruft of Fiction: Infinite Jest’s Endnotes Endnotes and the paradox of the encyclopedic novel The cruft of fiction Monumental dullness Filtering the Incandenza filmography Infinite Jest’s endnoted geopolitics Data detox Handling information in a grown-up way 8 “A Paradigm for the Life of Consciousness”: The Pale King1 I II III IV 9 “What Am I, a Machine?”: Humans and Information in The Pale King A measure of disorder Riding the crest What am I, a machine? All of this is true 10 The Politics of Boredom and the Boredom of Politics in The Pale King The construction of boredom Boredom and neoliberalism Paying attention: The cost of happiness 11 Trickle-Down Citizenship: Taxes and Civic Responsibility in The Pale King Works Cited Notes on Contributors Index