Modelos analizados con el programa Dyna5

This chapter is the first of three in which I examine the style and formal features of David Foster Wallace's writing.⁶¹ Across these three shorter chapters I will examine the implications of a figure that is recurrent in Wallace's writing in different ways, that of 'Zeno's Paradox'. We can use Wallace's description of the paradox to begin this investigation of its significance.⁶²

In Everything and More: A Compact History of ∞, Wallace outlines one version of Zeno's Paradox:

You're standing at a corner and the light changes and you try to cross the street. Note the operative 'try to'. Because before you can get all the way across the street, you obviously have to get halfway across.

And before you can get halfway across, you have to get halfway to that halfway point. This is just common sense. And before you can get to the halfway-to-the-halfway point, you have to get halfway to the halfway-to-the-halfway point point, and so on. And on. Put a little more sexily, the paradox is that a pedestrian cannot move from point A to point B without traversing all successive subintervals of AB, each subinterval equalling where n's values compose the sequence (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, …), with the '…' of course meaning the sequence has no finite end. Goes on forever. This is the dreaded regressus in infinitum, a.k.a. the Vicious Infinite Regress or VIR. What makes it vicious here

61 As described in the Introduction, these chapters will alternate with longer chapters exploring broader themes in Wallace's work.

62 Boswell mentions this form, though I believe it is much more much more important than his description maintains. (p. 113)

is that you're required to complete an infinite number of actions before attaining your goal, which – since the whole point of 'infinite' is that there's no end to the number of these actions – renders the goal logically impossible. Meaning you can't cross the street.⁶³

This is a description of logical impossibility impeding a straightforward action that is not in any way nonviable. With its description the result of endless logical digressiveness, the passage in many respects typifies Wallace's style. It encapsulates digression that is logical but gets us nowhere, on playing out a thought to its paradoxical end products. Wallace examines aspects of human experience that are mostly ignored, and uses the language of mathematics to the purpose of a logical rather than linguistic abstruseness. Zeno's paradox is thus an excellent description of how Wallace's style and methods operate.

This description of Zeno's paradox extends to a problem that is much larger than it first seems. Wallace's use of variations on this paradox

throughout his work demonstrates the importance he places on this larger problem. He states:

The trouble with college math classes – which classes consist almost entirely in the rhythmic ingestion and regurgitation of abstract

information, and are paced in such a way as to maximise this reciprocal data-flow – is that their sheer surface-level difficulty can fool us into thinking we really know something when all we really 'know' is abstract formulas and rules for their deployment. Rarely do math classes ever tell us whether a certain formula is truly significant, or why, or where it came from, or what was at stake.* There's clearly a difference between being able to use a formula correctly and really knowing how to solve a problem, knowing why a problem is an actual mathematical problem and not just an exercise.

63 David Foster Wallace, Everything and More: A Compact History of ∞ (London: Phoenix, 2005), p. 49. Quoted in full because this passage is important for the rest of the argument of this thesis. Emphasis retained.

And in the footnote anchored to the asterisk in this passage:

*And, of course, rarely do students think to ask – the formulas alone take so much work to 'understand' (i.e., to be able to solve problems correctly with), we often aren't aware that we don't understand them at all. That we end up not even knowing that we don't know is the really insidious part of most math classes. (p. 52, empasis retained) Post-postmodern society is one in which access to information and data has exploded. The values of postmodernism have levelled so much of it into blocks of consumable data, from cultural values, to aesthetics, to knowledge, to ethics. This passage suggests how these features could be presented like Zeno's paradox – they are abstract problems that are therefore solvable in the abstract – but that this misses the point. Rather, we should examine why or how these abstract forms pertain to the ways lives are lived. In the same way, we should see how the abstractions of information pertain to us, and thus see how their logical solutions give that information value.

Wallace's writing repeatedly features characters failing to get any closer to the end of an idea, becoming trapped in recursive, helical thought processes that cripple their ability to act. Such figures are examples of what is at stake both in the relationship between the abstract and the lived – in what he claims Zeno's paradox really means – but also in the ways contemporary culture produces the inability to consider properly and overcome such problems. In this way, Zeno's Paradox maps the hollow centre of post-postmodernism, as its endless intensification – always reaching halfway points – maps the circulation of all information within that culture.

Kyle McCarthy validates this reading of Wallace's approach when he discusses the fractal forms around which Infinite Jest was based. He finds that:

Wallace was drawn to paradoxes, to infinite recursions and eternal loops. He was drawn to fractals - shapes infinitely self-similar, "objects and concepts at the very farthest reaches of abstractions, things we literally cannot imagine." But it mattered to him that these

impossibilities are real, as Platonists believe, because he wanted a reason to get out of bed in the morning and figure them out.⁶⁴

My discussion of the elements of Wallace's writing will look for these 'self-similar objects' as a way of elucidating its post-postmodernist qualities.

McCarthy connects the notions of abstraction and the real, mathematical patterns and the 'reason to get out of bed'. These dualities are central to the pattern of this thesis.

Chapter One elucidated the link between recursive structures and the experience of depression in a way that relates to McCarthy's implicit

binaries. In this chapter I will invert this relationship, using the patterns of Wallace's prose to find how they inform and reflect his larger ideas about the experience of the post-postmodern. By analyzing examples of non-fiction, long- and short-form fiction I will show how the abstracted recursive form his sentences take produces a 'Zeno's paradox of meaning'. The

post-postmodernist form of the hollow-centre of experience is therefore embedded within the structuring of the smallest units of information.

2.2 'Authority and American Usage' – paratexts

The essay 'Tense Present', first published in 2001, and collected in Consider the Lobster under the internally-footnoted title 'Authority and American

64 Kyle McCarthy, 'Infinite Proofs: The Effects of Mathematics on David Foster Wallace', LA Review of Books, 27 November 2011, <http://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/infinite-proofs-the-effects-of-mathematics-on-david-foster-wallace/> [accessed 13 September 2013] (para. 30 of 31).

Usage* *or "Politics and the English Language" is Redundant' is not discussed here for any particularly striking facet of the sentences it

contains.⁶⁵ Stylistically, it is typical of Wallace's long non-fiction work. This is useful because there is a general consistency of voice to Wallace's non-fiction that is not always observable in his non-fiction.

Christoph Ribbat finds that one central distinction between Wallace's fiction and non-fiction is that the latter foregrounds '[…] subjectivity – not the subjectivity of a common-sense reporter hero, but the shaken, frustrated, disorientated kind'; in other words, the features that imply an author-figure of non-objective dimension, representing primarily the subject of Wallace. (p.

191) This produces a consistent, personal and recognizable figure and form across such writing. So, while the two pieces of fiction discussed later in this chapter display different aspects of Wallace's prose, 'Authority and American Usage' is a good place to start because it allows us to examine prose of a typically Wallace-ian type. This is useful before we move on to see similar features manifested in more disparate forms.

The paratextual material that is provided for the republished 'Authority and American Usage' is extensive and significant to an examination of the care Wallace takes over small units of meaning.⁶⁶ The essay's title is presented on a separate page and split into a large-type, capitalized and bolded central title, with the footnoted sub-title below.⁶⁷ The remainder of the

65 All references here are to 'AUTHORITY AND AMERICAN USAGE* *(or, “POLITICS AND THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE” IS REDUNDANT)'. 'Tense Present' was originally published in Harper's Magazine, April 2001, pp. 39-58.

66 Paratextual material, everything that makes up the physical presentation of a text beyond the specific text itself, is defined in Gérerd Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

67 Neither title nor sub-title reproduces the original essay's name, 'Tense Present', suggesting that this extended version has markedly different interests.

title page is filled with common examples of mistakes in grammar, spelling, and punctuation, printed less-than-half the size of the central title. The list begins '"Save up to 50%, and More!" Between you and I. On accident.

Somewhat of a.' (p. 65) This represents half of one line from the 70 lines of examples provided on this page.

Following the title page, the essay is preceded by an epigraph from Augustus: 'Dilige et quod vis fac.' This has a dual significance. Firstly, it is often misquoted as 'ama et fac quod vis.' This marks it as a high-minded reference to the common mistakes on the title page of the essay. Secondly, while in epigraphic form it is translated as 'Love, and do what thou wilt', it forms the introduction to a longer exhortation, in which appears the more relevant 'whether thou correct, through love correct', a statement more in keeping with the theme of mistake and correction found in 'Authority and American Usage'.⁶⁸

This paratextual material is a useful place to start thinking about the form and meaning of Wallace's work. We can find embedded within it the themes of self-cancellation and intensification of meaning that are present at many different levels of his work. Firstly, the conjoined titles split the theme of the essay immediately and hierarchically, as the secondary theme is reduced to a footnote.⁶⁹ The dual-layered titles internally accumulate meanings. The primary title is split in two, across the 'and' in 'Authority and American Usage', with the punning of the former term belied by the last

68 See Augustine Through the Ages: An Encyclopaedia, ed. by Allan D. Fitzgerald (Grand Rapids, MI; Cambridge: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1999), pp. 310-11.

69 That neither title replicates any aspect of the essay's original title, which is provided on the collection's legal disclaimer page (paratext at a further remove), adds a third, concealed level to the meanings the multiplications of titling produces. That this shrouded title has several punning implications, particularly through the word 'tense', resonates with the essay's overall theme of the struggle to control and mediate meaning, and the tensions and work that requires.

word, which democratizes meaning by creating the assumption that

'authority' consists in the neutral recording of practical 'usage'. In choosing to surround this title with a vast array of examples of 'authority' that leave

meaning either unclear or paradoxical, the page invalidates both the idea of 'authority' as the act of writing or 'usage' as an arbiter of meaning. It thereby undermines the idea that these are things to be privileged.

The addition of the footnoted secondary title completes this process of the undermining of the primary title by including a reference to the 'English Language'. This suggests an invalidity to the 'American' of the main title, reducing it to a subset of a larger form, to which both the 'authority' and 'usage' are subordinate. Secondly, the introduction of the concept of 'politics' introduces the idea that either way of understanding, judging, or recording language is subject to ideological concerns that do not rely on neutral considerations of how meaning is formed. Finally, this self-cancellation is also exercised internally to the secondary title, as its first two terms 'Politics and the English Language' are refuted by the term 'redundant'; each term makes the other unnecessary, just as the second title makes the first unnecessary.

Redundancy is among the most common of the mistakes in the phrases printed around the titles. Each of these pieces of language is a 'self-cancelling' failure of communication, as the internal problem highlighted in each prevents them from successfully making meaning. Taken together with the effects within the titles, this title page presents the reader with a

succession of smaller units of meaning, which are cancelled before meaning can be obtained. Each moves through an increasingly smaller chain towards meaning without ever fully generating an idea, as they are foreclosed by the

logical implications of the smaller units of meaning within themselves.⁷⁰ That the essay's epigraph highlights both mistake and correction indicates how the theme will be approached throughout the essay – and across Wallace's writing, I suggest – but its forbidding Latin and need for context suggests the work that will be required for correction of these problems to be achieved.

2.3 'Authority and American Usage' – sentences

After an opening paragraph in which a sequence of logically undermining questions follow each other,⁷¹ 'Authority and American Usage' is reset, with a new paragraph separated by the space of a line from these questions. This second introduction mirrors the dual titles of the piece. It is at once more specific in outlining the exact details of the project at hand, but also more general, in that it is descriptive of what is to come in the essay. It has two paragraphs, the first of which sets out the fact that the piece has been commissioned as a review, and as such 'is informed by a question that's too crass ever to mention upfront: "Should you buy this book?"' (p. 68)⁷² By nevertheless mentioning this upfront, Wallace demonstrates a determination that the rules of marketing or consumerist etiquette will not be upheld with the rigorousness with which linguistic or grammatical rules are. It stakes a claim to be outside the boundaries of the 'review' process, even as it proclaims itself to be within them, making this question another example of apparent redundancy.

70 This is an echo of Zeno's Paradox, with the movement across the street in Wallace's exemplification of the paradox replaced with a reader's movement through language to generate meaning.

71 For example, the penultimate: 'Did you know that probing the seamy underbelly of US lexicography reveals ideological strife and controversy and intrigue[…]?' is annulled by the final 'Did you know that US lexicography even had a seamy underbelly?'. (p. 67)

72 Wallace recognized the profit-making motivation for writing, for example when talking about his first novel ["My great horror for the last year is that Viking is going to take a bath on me," says Wallace. He lights the first of a seemingly endless succession of cigarettes.

"They picked up The Broom of the System at an auction for $20,000. I thought it was going to be the Heaven's Gate of the publishing industry." He corrects himself. "Well, at the time, it seemed like a lot of money to me." William, R. Kartovsky, 'David Foster Wallace: A Profile', in Conversations with David Foster Wallace, ed. by Stephen J. Burn (Jackson, MS:

University of Mississippi Press, 2012), pp. 5-6.

By stating upfront exactly what a review must not state upfront, this sentence does not cancel the piece's status as review: ultimately, it will be expected to assess some aspect of the book under consideration, informing the reader as to its worth. While answering the question might be the aim of the review, its approach will be to pay particular attention to each of the aspects that inform its assessment of the text. Because the book under examination is a dictionary, it is expected to have a use-value, rather than an aesthetic worth. This means exploring the book as a functional product, which in turn means investigating the functions it can perform, and the various qualitative assessments that must follow should describe how well the book performs each function. This assessment of the text as highly specific functional object disallows the typical shorthand that characterizes the marketing of books. The sentence implicitly claims this is a positive thing because, as the many examples of marketing-speak in the title page's litany of linguistic mistakes shows, that lexical group seems inherently to lack the ability successfully to produce meaning.

Effectively, the sentence begins the re-definition of the term 'review' by showing how its scope is necessarily expanded by this piece. The

approach taken to reviewing will be a logical and necessary intensification of the logic of the review within a capitalist system, producing more information than would normally be provided: hence, its extended length. This

redefinition is not only an intensification of the form of the review; it also invalidates more typical review forms and language structures. This begs the question, if reviews are typically meaningless, why should this review,

extended in every direction, not provide simply the same cancellation on a grander scale? In producing more specific information about the author's

functional relationship to a dictionary, the review produces a hyper-specificity that invalidates the meaning of the text as 'review' by adding too much

irrelevant information to its structure. This review is relevant to someone exactly like its author; increasingly so, as it expands into further detail and specificity. This is a function of all Wallace's writing, one that is emphasized in this essay.

The second paragraph of this section features two sentences that are relevant to discussing the hyper-specificity of Wallace's writing. The second of these deserves attention here, as it carries many of the markers of his style:

But the really salient and ingenious features of A Dictionary of Modern American Usage involve issues of rhetoric and ideology and style,

and it is impossible to describe why these issues are important and why Garner's management of them borders on genius without talking about the historical context [long footnote, including secondary

interpolation, excised here] in which ADMAU appears, and this

context turns out to be a veritable hurricane of controversies involving everything from technical linguistics and public education to political ideology, [shorter footnote excised here] and these controversies take a certain amount of time to unpack even before their relation to what makes Garner's dictionary so eminently worth your hard-earned

context turns out to be a veritable hurricane of controversies involving everything from technical linguistics and public education to political ideology, [shorter footnote excised here] and these controversies take a certain amount of time to unpack even before their relation to what makes Garner's dictionary so eminently worth your hard-earned