ASUMIR EL LIDERAZGO

It’s the familiar love-hate syndrome of seduction: ‘I don’t really care what it is I say, I care only that you like it. But since your good opinion is the sole arbiter of my success and worth, you have tremendous power over me, and I fear you and hate you for it.’ This dynamic isn’t exclusive to art. But I often think I can see it in myself and in other young writers, this desperate desire to please coupled with a kind of hostility to the reader. (Wallace, in McCaffery 2012: 25)

Introduction: Critical Paradigms in David Foster Wallace Studies

This chapter investigates key areas of concern in contemporary David Foster Wallace scholarship, in order to highlight the complex significance of the term ‘reader’ in relation to Wallace and his works. By reviewing antecedent claims about the relationship between Wallace and the reader, the present chapter provides a preliminary working account of self-reflexivity in Wallace scholarship, as indicated by the field’s complex treatment of three concepts – empathetic identification, suspicious critique and critical abstraction. These concepts are, I think, essential to the way we talk about

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Wallace, especially when considering the self-reflexive nature of the author’s rhetoric on reading and interpretation. Nevertheless, as the critics engaged with in this chapter have all pointed out, these self-reflexive aspects of Wallace’s fictional project remain ambiguously defined in relation to the author’s plain-spoken insistence that fiction is (or should be) “an act of communication between one human being and another” (Wallace 1997: 144). While empathy is undoubtedly the most prominent angle for discussing this kind of ambiguity, close attention to the scholarship reveals a far more complex critical paradigm, which expresses a diverse range of theoretical and post-theoretical discourses on criticism and reading (and which incorporates, of course, Wallace’s more overt ventures into these subjects in numerous articles, essays and interviews). Following from the concerns with paradigmatic language outlined in the introduction, my aim here is to provide a foundational sense of this self-reflexive ambiguity in Wallace’s texts, particularly as it impacts on contemporary critical narratives around those texts. In so doing, this chapter provides further elaboration of the term ’reader’ within contemporary Wallace scholarship.

On this basis, it is of course pertinent to begin the present study with a recapitulation of Wallace research to date, especially when that research is itself highly concerned with what the author had to say about the practice and reception of fiction. It is no secret that Wallace had ideas on how texts (including his own) were to be read, and that many of these ideas have been thoroughly canvassed already in Wallace Studies, particularly in major contributions from Marshall Boswell (2003; 2013; 2014), Adam Kelly (2010a;

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2010b; 2014; 2015), Mary K Holland (2004; 2013), Clare Hayes-Brady (2010; 2013), Lee Konstantinou (2012), David Hering (2010; 2016), Toon Staes (2014) and Stephen Burn (2012a; 2012b; 2013). In these works, and in the burgeoning field influenced by these works, Wallace’s articulations of the reader-text relationship have inspired a wide range of self-reflexive interpretive approaches, within which the role of the critic, and the functions of criticism as a communicative practice, are placed into decisive question. Meanwhile, Wallace’s forceful arguments for ideas like literary empathy, the critique of postmodernity, the role of the author and the nature of metafiction are notoriously complex, and remain difficult to disentangle from their presentation in his equally-complex fictions. This particular sense of difficulty is a motivating focus for the present study – like the critics considered here, I am interested in the ways that Wallace’s texts have anticipated or impacted upon their own critical reception, and the ways in which scholarship to date has effectively responded to this dynamic.

By retracing the paradigmatic language of contemporary Wallace Studies, and the kinds of interpretive difficulties raised by this language, this chapter thus lays the essential groundwork for the close analyses of Wallace to follow. As suggested in the introduction, the overt self-reflexivity of Wallace literary project can be effectively described as a form of repetition – specifically, a return to or reprisal of psychoanalytic discourses about the reader-text relationship. As this chapter demonstrates, the key index of such repetition is the extent to which ‘readers’ are discussed and contested in Wallace’s work and reception. While reviewing the baseline idea of self-

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reflexivity in Wallace, then, I have also sought to connect this idea with the diverse reader-positioning strategies that this idea makes possible, whilst observing the repetition of particular psychoanalytic reading-tropes within the works of prominent Wallace scholars. The idea that there is already a critical rhetoric in Wallace’s fiction, and that attempts to reconfigure that rhetoric end up repeating it in strange ways, is described here as an escalation of interpretive stakes. The foundations of this claim are established through this chapter and its methodological counterpart, which take up the question of the Wallace ‘reader’ from two different angles. By retracing the idea of an “act of communication” through prominent works within the field, this chapter considers the self-reflexive rhetoric at stake in Wallace’s fiction, and the literalistic, imaginative and abstract possibilities suggested by that rhetoric. But having connected this self-reflexivity to a particular critical trope – reference to or repetition of the ‘reader’ – this chapter also frames the psychoanalytically-informed discussions about repeating, reading and transference-neurosis which follow in Chapter 2.If Wallace’s texts are as concerned with the ‘reader’ as they repeatedly say they are, then there is a case to be made that certain concerns repeat. by locating specific repetitions, and considering what it is for a ‘fiction about fiction’ to repeat itself, this study will subsequently ground its finding in the Freudian idea of acting-out, whilst also gesturing, perhaps by way of exhaustion, towards the limits of a psychoanalytic reading of Wallace. I have said that Wallace’s metafictional works appear uniquely conscious of their ‘reader’, whilst maintaining that this literary self-consciousness is an estranging literary phenomenon, whose

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effects may be better described as a kind of acting-out, a performance of the ‘reader’ in place of actual critical dialogue with actual readers.

By reviewing the specific kinds of repetition at stake in Wallace’s rhetoric of the ‘reader’, and the complex theoretical language used to justify this repetition, we can better understand the self-reflexivity of Wallace Studies as a critical paradigm. Broadly, this study argues that the field of literary criticism involves making significant and persuasive claims about texts, about authors and about readers. Wallace’s texts, which are paradigmatically aware of their situation ‘as’ texts, amplify and exemplify this particular critical situation, whilst exploring and challenging that situation’s preconditions in postmodern literary theory (‘Greatly Exaggerated’, 1997), televisual irony (‘E Unibus Pluram’, 1997), biography (‘Joseph Frank’, 2005) and so forth. As a consequence of this sophisticated, far-ranging and self-conscious literary project, the field of Wallace Studies is also uniquely aware of its own status as literary criticism. Whether advocating the author as herald for a new literary vanguard (Boswell 2003: 1), investigating the significance of “Sincerity” (Kelly 2010), “hyperawareness” (Hayes-Brady 2013) and narcissistic ambivalence (Holland 2013) in his works, or considering pertinent theoretical and ideological frameworks in which those works can be understood (Konstantinou 2012; Staes 2014; Hering 2010), major scholarship on Wallace has seen the acts of reading and critical exegesis placed into question time and time again, in a manner which both indicates the complex interpretive challenges at stake in Wallace’s texts. This critical self-awareness is one of the

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most interesting things about contemporary Wallace Studies, and is also particularly suited to an author like Wallace, whose self-reflexive engagements with cultural, theoretical and philosophical paradigms are also considered here. On this basis, this chapter connects these major works with the preliminary concerns of this thesis, with each section highlighting a particular question around the concept of an author-reader relationship in Wallace’s works and reception. Like Wallace’s texts, Wallace scholarship is often explicitly concerned with what it takes to ‘make a claim’, whether that claim is about the world we live in, the various worlds imagined in fiction, or the more abstract and theoretical worlds suggested by literary criticism and the metafictional text. However, in order to investigate the vast wealth of claims at stake in contemporary Wallace Studies, it is arguably important to take a step back and distinguish between different paradigmatic approaches to the author and his works, particularly as indicated or implied by the works of major scholars in the field. By retracing these approaches, this chapter outlines four effective senses of the ‘reader’ in relation to Wallace and his literary project, which are investigated further in Chapters 3-6 of the present study.

Taken together, these ‘readers’ provide insight into what Wallace meant when he described fiction as “an act of communication”, and what scholars mean when discussing the ideas and commitments at stake in the author’s expansive works. Viewed apart, these ‘readers’ can help us understand the complex paradigmatic and rhetorical stakes of those same

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works. By distinguishing between literal readers who identify, imaginative readers who critique, abstract readers who narrate and transferential-neurotic readers who negate, this study presents a meta-rhetoric for the Wallace reader, which reflects and reflects upon the games with literality, imagination and abstraction at stake in Wallace’s short fictions and essays. The plurality of reading-positions at stake in Wallace’s fiction borders on the hyperbolic, but close attention to existing scholarship on the Wallace ‘reader’ indicates that these are specialised areas of concern. Whether discussing the idea of an “act of communication”, challenging this notion or considering its more abstract bases, I find that the most estranging thing about the Wallace’s rhetoric of the ‘reader’ is that rhetoric’s reprisal of certain Freudian ideas about reading, repetition and transference-neurosis. In advance of this psychoanalytic account, I have elected to highlight the ways in which estrangement – alternately figured as interpretive uncertainty, ambiguity or antagonism – has been most effectively dealt with in existing Wallace scholarship. Crucially, this approach allows for a more direct articulation of the typology put forth here, concerning statements or rhetorical claims about the ‘reader’.

The present chapter provides substantive weight to these ideas by considering their complex articulation by Wallace and Wallace scholarship, and by specifically highlighting the significance of the term ‘reader’ in these same discussions. With Boswell and Kelly, I revisit the theme of empathetic identification in Wallace’s early rhetorics on fiction, whilst considering the forms of immediacy, immanence or common-sense understanding revealed

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therein. With Holland and Hayes-Brady, I take up the question of suspicious critique in Wallace’s works, with a particular focus on narrative, thematic and characterological analysis of texts in a postmodern context. Finally, with Staes, I consider the kinds of critical abstraction conveyed by Wallace’s works, particularly when examined alongside more abstract contexts of critical rhetoric and reader-response theory established in the introduction. Here I note that the theorisation of the ‘implied author’ (Staes 2014) provides both a preliminary abstract basis for contemporary Wallace Studies (allowing for more broad-ranging engagements with the field), whilst also repeating certain escalations or anxieties from precedent analyses of the Wallace ‘reader’. It is at this point that our concern with the ‘implied reader’ becomes viable, and our escalatory move towards a fourth reading position – which recognises and reflects on such repetitions of such ‘readers’ in critical rhetoric – becomes significant.

“Wallace identifies (with) the reader” –

Literality, Reference and Repetition

Who are ‘we’ in relation to David Foster Wallace and his texts? This is a question that gets asked often, albeit indirectly, by scholars in the field of Wallace Studies. We are, after all, the nominally-intended audience of Wallace’s fictions – the readers buying his books, actually reading, thinking about and talking about them and so forth. But we are also led to ask this kind

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of question by Wallace’s own texts, particularly when those texts remain involved with complex questions of identity, agency and response, and especially when considering the significance of terms like ‘reader’, ‘reading’ and ‘readership’. For one paradigmatic example, we could consider an essay like ‘E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction’ (1997), which contains many of the author’s most strident and compelling statements about “a certain subgenre of pop-conscious fiction, written mostly by young Americans” (49), as well as postmodern irony and ‘millennial’ attitudes towards reading and interpretation. These statements are couched in the language of television and “televisual culture” (49), and threaded through Wallace’s famous critique of same – for the author, the evolution of television as both medium and cultural mediator had made it “invulnerable to […] transfiguring assault” (50), that is, insusceptible to the kinds of suspicious and abstract ironies deployed in metafiction or postmodern “Image-fiction” (51- 54). In ‘Pluram’, this ironic invulnerability has something to do with the attitudes and expectations of readers, and the ways in which television “managed to become its own best analyst” (30), by repurposing these expectations for the viewing audience:

‘Television’, after all, literally means ‘seeing-far’; and our six hours daily not only helps us feel up-close and personal at like the Pan-Am Games or Operation Desert Shield but also, inversely, trains us to relate real live personal up-close stuff the same way we relate to the distant and exotic, as if separated from us by physics or glass, extant only as performance, awaiting our cool review […] Television has pulled the old dynamic of reference and redemption inside out: it is now television that takes elements of the postmodern – the involution, the absurdity, the sardonic fatigue, the iconoclasm

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and rebellion – and bends them to the ends of spectation and consumption (64, original emphasis)

There is quite a lot to unpack in this sort of statement – the reference to television’s ‘literal’ meaning, the idea of feeling “up-close and personal” whilst distancing ourselves from “real live personal up-close stuff”, and the complex implied links between ideas like reference, redemption, spectation and consumption. But for now, it is sufficient to highlight that these issues, as presented by the author, are in some way supposed to be our issues. In the versatile essayistic style of ‘Pluram’, Wallace makes it clear that the various attitudes of television and fiction being considered are extensions of audience expectation – from routine use of the third-person, to the imagining of “fiction writers as a species”, “oglers” and “viewers”, to figures like “Joe Briefcase” – “the average U.S. lonely person” (23) – who effectively personifies the kinds of consumption and spectatorship avowed by the essay. In his oft-cited concluding remarks to ‘Pluram’, Wallace suggests that “the new rebels” of avant-garde literature “might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists” (81) – that is, artists who are defined by their “willingness to be suckered by a world of lurkers and starers who fear gaze and ridicule above imprisonment without law” (81-82). But this strange televisual polemic, of lurkers, starers, oglers, viewers, yawners, eye-rollers, nudgers and “ironists”, remains ultimately concerned with the act of the interpreter, as Wallace concludes the essay on an ambivalent note: “I guess that means we all get to draw our own conclusions. Have to. Are you immensely pleased” (82).

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When Wallace talks about the ‘reader’, there is always an element of identification at stake. But what is being identified? Or rather, who is being identified with? These kinds of questions have animated Wallace scholarship for well over a decade, particularly in major works by Marshall Boswell and Adam Kelly, which investigate complex questions of empathy, sentimentality and sincerity within Wallace’s fictions and broader literary project. In the influential Understanding David Foster Wallace (2003), Boswell aligns Wallace’s project with a kind of “third wave modernism” (1), whose characteristics are drawn from the complex strategies of modernist and postmodernist fiction in the 20th _{century. For Boswell, Wallace’s literary}

innovations stem from his attention to the epistemological and ontological consequences of postmodernity for the fiction writer (10), particularly when it comes to issues like empathetic identification and suspicious irony. On the one hand, Wallace’s texts partake in a modernist “valorization of individual subjective experience” – hyper-complex and intentionally indeterminate, Wallace’s texts play on epistemological questions of definition, sense and meaning (10). On the other hand, these texts also partake in a decidedly postmodernist shift of emphasis “from epistemology to ontology, the study of metaphysical grounds, essentially of being” (11). In this latter sense, the Wallace text operates in a curious intellectual space, whose grounds appear essentially uncertain – this is certainly borne out by a text like ‘Pluram’, which places postmodern and televisual ontology squarely within its sights, whilst deliberately failing to conclude itself outside of those frameworks. This sort of uncertainty has been noted by critics like A.O. Scott, who asks “Are

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[Wallace’s] harangues against the tyranny of irony meant to be taken in earnest, or are they artfully constructed simulacra of what a sincere anti- ironist might sound like?” (2000: Para 10).

Responding to Scott, Boswell suggests that Wallace’s texts are indeed earnest in some sense – whilst repeating key strategies from modernist and postmodernist literature, and partaking heavily in the theoretical discourses of his time, Wallace is unique in his attention to “the delusion that cynicism and naiveté are mutually exclusive” (in Boswell: 16), a focus which enables the author to examine and potentially get beyond certain generic and intentional restrictions through effective communication with his reader. The result, for Boswell, is that Wallace’s texts “succeed in creating a special, surprisingly intimate zone of communication, of subjective interaction, that is unlike anything else in contemporary literature” (19). For Boswell, this sense of communication is surprising because it inheres in a context of sophisticated uncertainty, of the kind frequently represented in fictions like Infinite Jest (1996). Nevertheless, it is there, plain as day, in Wallace’s texts, for example when the author speaks to the differences between “good art” and “so-so art” in the McCaffery interview – the key difference, Wallace suggests, has “something to do with love”, or rather “with having the discipline to talk out of the part of yourself that can love, instead of the part that just wants to be loved” (2012: 50).

Wallace’s unvarnished emphasis on literary love indicates just how seriously the author took the idea of literature as a vehicle for empathetic

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identification, or what Boswell terms “subjective interaction” (2003: 17). Moreover, it arguably highlights the author’s strident sense of the literal – in our rhetoric, the sense of a reader ‘beyond’ the text, a non-figurative identity to whom the text might address its various declarations of love (See Chapter 3). I believe that Boswell’s work highlights literalistic and figurative dilemmas which are central to Wallace’s fictions, and is a necessary resource for talking about empathy, identification and literality in those fictions. These dilemmas often hinge on the idea that Wallace’s texts are, in a paraphrase of his own words, “both diagnosis and cure” (Boswell 2003: 17) – that is, they are in one