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MLA 09: Some Notes on Panels

January 11, 2010 in Digital Humanities, Infinite Jest, blogging, intellectual property, literature, modernism

In a great, collectively authored post at Profhacker, Janine Utell observes the comparative dearth of tweets concerning our shared field. “There was a silence, a whistling void where there should have been voices: where were the literature folks, people doing research, giving and listening to papers in my area? Where are my fellow modernists, commenting on what we were all learning at the convention?” I felt a particular pang of guilt.

While I attended plenty of panels at MLA this year, I didn’t tweet too much (that is, at all). While there are technological reasons for my relative silence (anyone want to give me a Droid?), the primary reason I didn’t tweet more is because of my assumption that only Digital Humanities folks follow MLA on twitter (not, say, modernists). I mean, what is the sense of tweeting a panel on Pound into a whistling void? But, of course, if there was a whistling void it is at least partially (though probably only partially) my fault. As Janine’s comment makes clear, there are actually a good bunch of modernists already on twitter. So, inspired by Janine’s comment (and the excellent write-up of the Legacy of David Foster Wallace Panel by Kathleen Fitzpatrick, which I was sure had me up at 8:30 Wednesday), here is a quick digest of my notes from MLA, with all snark and doodles redacted, made in atonement for my silence.

I haven’t included all my notes for all the panels I attended. I should note that “653. Cognitive Approaches to Literature: Are We Beyond Science Envy Yet?” was, with the Freud panel described below, the best attended of the panels I sat in on (I’ll leave the implied contrast between these two panels to your imagination); but I was primarily interested in trying to understand exactly what a “Cognitive Approach to Literature” would be, that I didn’t really take any notes. Should any of the mentioned below find this page and wish to amend/change/contest anything I say below, please let me know in the comments. I’m happy to amend the post as needed. Indeed, going over my notes, I learned that I probably need to take better notes in the future… But if nothing else, these notes may, through the deliberate serendipity of Google, allow some folks to find one another.

Panels

  • 150. Unboxing Modernism: Beyond the Divides”: Introducing this panel, Melba Cuddy-Keane provided a brief outline of the development of modernist studies from 1970s to the present, from the consolidation of definitions of modernism in terms of formal experimentalization, to the recognition of the exclusions of such formulations (broadly speaking, this narrative seems applicable to literary studies as a whole). Our own period, she suggests, is one of refusing of closure—of attempting to keep the very definition of modernism open. The panelists, she suggests, offer visions of how this might be achieved.

    Broadly speaking, the panelists seemed to split into two groups: Ann Ardis and Michael Leja were interested in locating modernism within a larger frame of cultural reference, taking modernism out of the hermetically sealed “box” of high culture (to use the somewhat abused metaphor dominating the panel). Leja was interested in showing the similarities between modernist art (construed broadly enough to include abstract expressionism) and larger developments in visual culture. Ardis discussed periodical studies as providing one avenue that can enrich our understanding of the period, by forcing us to return to the complexity of the primary source. She mentioned anonymous/pseudonymous/collective authorship, and the complex international circulation of such periodicals, as obvious areas of interest. Anita Patterson and Steven Yao were interested in challenging the geography of modernism, locating modernism within a transnational framework. Patterson’s work focuses on modernist poets connected to the Americas (Jules Laforgue, St. John Perse, Wilson Harris). Yao’s work focuses on the Pacific, particularly with the fascination of some modernists with translating works they could not really read (all those poems “from the Chinese”).

    In the comments, the provocative question of whether “modernism” was even a valuable term anymore was raised. Panelists did not seem to come to any consensus about this important question, and (alack!) the panel ended before it was fully pursued.

    The panelists also provided a helpful run down of some of the most interesting recent works in modernist studies. Among the works mentioned were:

    • Christopher Bush, Ideographic Modernism: China, Writing, Media(Oxford Univ. Press, 2010)
    • Pacific Rim Modernisms, edited by Mary Ann Gilles, Helen Sword, and Steven Yao (Univ. of Toronto Press, 2009)
    • Lesley Wheeler, Voicing American Poetry: Sound and Performance from the 1920s to the Present (Cornell Univ. Press, 2008)
    • Pericles Lewis, Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2010)

  • 235. Law and the Modernist Atlantic: These three papers all considered some aspect of modernism’s (broadly construed) encounter with “the law.” Lisa Fluet’s paper “‘Liberal Fascism,’ Human Rights, and the State: On H.G. Wells” pursued the imagining of the state in the work of H. G. Wells. While the state has tended to be an object of critique in leftist and Foucauldian narrative, Wells’s narrative, she suggests, offers a way of imagining the state more positively. Unlike figures like Henry James or Virginia Woolf, concerned with recording subjective experience (“how the world feels”), Wells offers something like a “novel of information” (Fluet here borrows James Wood’s term, describing the contemporary novel) concerned with describing how the world actually works. For Fluet, Wells’s work offers an important opportunity to do what the novels of James and Woolf cannot do—imagine the state.

    Kelly McDowell’s “The Perverse ‘Look’ of the Law: Ulysses and Obscenity” offered a close, theoretically informed reading of “Nausicaa” episode. The episode’s representation of Gerty MacDowell and Leopold Bloom demonstrate the perversity inherent in the law itself. The normativity of the law itself, in the interacting gazes of Bloom and Gerty, undermines itself. McDowell closed by reading the logic of the “Nausicaa” chapter into the obscenity trials that it sparked.

    Thomas Cohen offered a fascinating look at Kathy Acker’s literary appropriations, and the legal controversy, by looking at Acker’s text “Dead Doll Humility.” Drawing on Lyotard’s notion of the differnd, Cohen traced the conflict between experimental writing and intellectual property in Acker’s work. Cohen helpfully quotes Geoffery Bennington on Lyotard: “an accusation of theft might well also involve a diffénd, if one of the parties does not recognize that the object in question is a legitimate object of property.” Such, Cohen suggests, is the case with Acker’s appropriations/plagiarisms of four pages of Harold Robbins’s The Pirate in Acker’s “The Adult Life of Toulouse Lautrec” (“Dead Doll Humility” responds to the controversy which followed this plagiarism).

  • 294. The Death of Freud?: This was the most crowded panel I attended. The second panelist was unable to attend because of illness, allowing Jean-Michel Rabatè to speak at length. His paper, entitled “What is to be preferred, Death of Obsolecence?”, provided a fascinating meditation on the place of death in Freud’s work. Rabaté began by contrasting his two titular terms, obsolescence being a sort of incomplete, unsuccessful death. Freudian psychoanalysis, by midcentury, had been co-opted by a “weak adaptive culturalism,” (what Lacan decried in “ego-psychology”). Adorno and Lacan both sought to save psychoanalysis from this fate (cf. “In psychoanalysis nothing is true except the exaggerations” – Adorno; the entire Lacanian rereading of Freud). In this regard, death, indeed, seems preferable to obsolescence.

    From here Rabaté moved to a discussion of the changing place of death in Freud’s work. This preoccuptation with death begins early, in a set of letters written in Spanish to Edouard Silberstein. Indeed, Freud seems tohave taught himself at least passable Spanish in order to conduct this correspondence, which was inspired by Cervantes’s Dialogue of the Dogs. The letters are interesting because they are structued by an injunction similar to that of free association. They also, however, feature a prohibition on describing death (one is not to say that “One has died”; substituting instead some sort of euphemism). This correspondence, with its anticipation of free association, the obvious importance of language (it was conducted in Spanish), and its vexed relationship to death, provides a model for a set of issues which will continue to constellate in interesting ways throughout Freud’s work. (In its ambition to trace key themes throughout Freud’s work, and with death in particular, Rabaté’s talk reminded me frequently of Laplanche’s Life and Death in Psychoanalysis).

    This concern with death puts Freud in dialogue with the better part of nineteenth-century German philosophy: Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche. Rabaté continued to the famous discussion of death in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, where precisely the question of the origin of death is broached explicitly. Is death an internal necessity or is it merely imposed from without? (This is the key question about whether a “death drive” exists.) In closing, he briefly discussed a thinker (about whom I knew nothing) who most emphatically believed that death was not a necessity: the Russian philosopher Nikolai Fyodorov, a resolutely anti-Heideggerian (and somewhat crazy) figure for whom death is a purely external phenomenon to be resisted (he proposed, as humanity’s key project, resurrecting everyone… yeah).

    In the Q&A period questions returned to panel’s titular question, trying to think about Freud’s continuing relevance through the psychoanalytic categories of mourning/melancholia, or the Derridean notion of ‘hauntology’ (preserving “a specter of Freud”). Rabatè responded by trying to move past these oft-referenced categories. “There is no ontology of psychoanalysis,” he insisted. Ontology itself is not a Freudian category; the concern with language, the concern with the Other in us (the work of culture), that is Freudian.

    (Oh, and I learned that Freud, like W. B. Yeats, had had a vasectomy—or Steinach procedure—in the belief that the procedure had rejuvenating effects.)

  • 364. D. H. Lawrence’s Short Stories: Beth McFarland-Wilson’s paper, “A Family Systems Interpretation of ‘Horse Dealer’s Daughter’” offered a reading of Lawrence’s story from the perspective of “family systems theory.” This approach allowed McFarland-Wilson’s reading to understand the story outside the terms of Oedipal desire that predominate in existing readings. Carrie Rohman’s “Ecology and the Creaturely in ‘Sun’” draws on Merleau-Ponty and reads the character Juliet, in “Sun,” as an experiment in the role of the irrational and the creaturely, a flight from humanism to a view of the subject as ecologically situated. The streaming “dark flow” between Juliet and the sun captures well the relationship between the body and the world that Merleau-Ponty describes as the “flesh of the world,” the perceiving body that is at once part of the world it perceives. Pamela K. Wright’s paper, “Till Death Do Us Part: The Implications of Illness, Disability, and Death on Love and Romance in Lawrence’s ‘The Blind Man’ and Somerset Maugham’s ‘Sanitorium’”, explored the role of disability in the two stories. Lawrence’s ‘The Blind Man’, Wright suggests, offers a more complex and sympathetic representation of the disabled body than that, for example, of Clifford Chatterley, whose disability comes to symbolized a broader cultural impotence.

  • 513. Joycean Materialities: Christy Burns’s “Circean Sense: Phenomenology in Joyce” examined the representation of sensate experience in Ulysses. Burns suggests that Stephen (on the beach in “Telemachus”), and Leopold Bloom on the beach later in Ulysses, offer two different attitudes toward the object world (Stephen’s disdain of brute materiality and Bloom’s immersion in the sensual world). “Circe,” in which objects themselves take on a life of their own, dramatizes the tension between these two different attitudes. David Earle’s fascinating “James Joyce, Gently Used: Republication and Dissemiation of Popular Modernism” contested the fetishization of the first-edition, to suggest that pulp editions of modernist works served a too-often ignored role in popularizing these works. Earle shared many fascinating popular versions of modernist texts, including an appearance of Joyce’s poems in American Girl (the periodical of the American Girl Scouts), and even mentioned the pulp edition of Bubu of Montparnasse, with an introduction by T. S. Eliot (which I’ve mentioned here). Sean Latham’s “Joyce’s Dirty Work” took as its object of analysis the literal dirt of “dear dirty Dublin” as an especially valuable way about thinking about the mongrel nature of the Irish nation as it emerges in the age of what Ulrich Beck calls the “risk society.”

  • 588. Copyright and the Modernist Atlantic: Versions of the three papers from this panel will all appear in a forthcoming volume, Modernism and Copyright, edited by Paul Saint-Amour. Robert Spoo’s “Copyright Deformations and the Transatlantic Publishing Scene” offered a historically rich account of the complex ways copyright impacted modernist literature. The US in this period (and until 1989) did not participate in the Berne Convention which establishes international copyright standards. Instead, to claim a copyright in the United States, a book had to be published/printed in the United States (the “manufacturing clause” of US copyright). Informally, “courtesy of the trade” prevented rampant piracy, but this informal system withered in the early years of the twentieth century as new publishers emerged, and a more competitive publishing environment developed. Joseph Slaughter’s “Plagiarism, Promiscuous Translation, and Yambo Ouologuem’s Primitivism: or, The Following Takes Place (Again) between 12am and 1am, 14 July 1913,” began by comparing two different translations of Oulouguem’s Le Devoir de Violence (the long title makes sense). The 1971 translation by Ralph Manheim introduced allusions to Eliot and Dickinson in the novel (replacing allusions in the original to Homer). These allusions became an object of controversy in discussions of the novel. Generally, Slaughter suggests, allusion becomes plagiarism when writer and reader are not able to share a common text/heritage/culture. In this way, the question of allusion/plagiarism in Ouloguem’s novel became a question of cultural authenticity—to what extent can an African novelist allude to Western canonicals works without being accused of plagiarism? Paul Saint-Amour’s “Modernism, Copyright, and the Counter Factual” suggests a shift in the concept of copyright during the twentieth century from the individual to the population, from the individualized logic of the author function to a more biopolitical logic. This shift in conceptualization of intellectual property, Saint-Amour suggests, and the counterfactual logic the law sometimes uses, are behind contemporary extensions of copyright. But they might also open up new avenues of contestation. For example, while some arguments for extending copyright terms rely on longer life expectancies, mightn’t this same logic suggest that copyright should expire sooner in those nations with lower life expectancies?

  • 612. The Legacy of David Foster Wallace: Why would I write this panel up, when Kathleen Fitzpatrick has already done a fantastic job?

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A Final, Belated, Infinite Summer Post

October 15, 2009 in Infinite Jest

Needless to say, readers of Infinite Jest, spoilers follow.

So it is over. My own posts on Infinite Jest sort of suddenly stopped more than a month ago, but I thought a final reckoning worthwhile. My own rather abrupt retirement from regularly writing about the novel was largely a function of the way I read the novel—after Gately is shot, the sense of the plot coming together made the book compulsively readable. And so I raced through the final pages and once I’d finished the only thing I could really think of talking about was the novel’s ending.

When I finished the novel, like many readers, I initially felt a bit cheated. The discussion of Infinite Jest on Slate’s Audio Book Club (which I just discovered recently) does a good job of articulating this feeling of irresolution in the novel’s conclusion. The canonical statement of this feeling is probably Michiko Kakutani’s review of the novel—a review which itself elicited comments from Wallace).

In part this initial disappointment was a function of my own experience reading the novel; for the first 250 pages I was willing to entertain it as a big, expansive, funny, postmodern romp, but one which would be as much a demonstration of Wallace’s enormous intellect as it would be an actual narrative. But I became increasingly convinced around the 250 page mark that the novel was going, against all odds, to come together—that, in short, this was not simply a novel of complexity for complexity’s sake but a novel that would elegantly bring its numerous strands together.

I put a whole lot of stock in the brief comment on page 17 that seemed to suggest that Hal and Gately would eventually end up digging up J. O. Incandenza’s head together and awaited this moment with anticipation. Indeed, I made a habit of rereading the opening chapter on the assumption that it provided the horizon toward which the novel was inexorably moving. When Avery Edison wrote a post declaring “I am not enjoying this book,” I wore my plot-driven excitement on my sleeve in a comment on the Infinite Summer blog—a comment that in retrospect seems to quaintly mix naïveté and enthusiasm.

The promise of page 17 also offered the possibility of Hal and Gately meeting. Readers of Ulysses know that one of that enormous novel’s pleasures is finally getting to see Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom bump into one another after just missing each other during a day’s worth of walking about Dublin. When the bookish and melancholy Stephen finally talks to Leopold Bloom, it is a genuinely thrilling moment. And indeed the sort of strange spiritual kinship that seems to draw Stephen and Bloom together appears to be operating between Hal and Gately; in both novels we have a precociously intelligent young man dealing with Hamletian (Hamlet-esque?) family tragedy, and an older, less educated, working adult male who, though less obviously “intellectual,” seems the wiser figure in the end. Stephen’s late-adolescent intellectual angst is in part deflated by being juxtaposed by Bloom’s invigorating pragmatism, and one senses a very similar relationship in the parallel lives of the brilliant Hal and the more practical Gately.

And, of course, pg 17 holds out another sort of promise—a thrilling conclusion to the novel’s plot of political struggle between complexly motivated Quebecois terrorists and the O.N.A.N.ite government which will somehow bring together Hal, Gately, John Wayne, and J.O.I.’s head. I raced forward in part because the novel seemed poised to achieve the impossible, to wed genres that don’t seem particularly compatible—the family drama and the political thriller, to combine “a ripping yarn” (to quote the cover of a late nineteenth century blood and thunder boy’s novel that happens to be on my desk) with a thoughtful reflection on life in a hypermediated society. Such a combination might seem to present a paradox that is impossible to maintain. But this very paradox is folded into the novel’s persistent meditations on “entertainment.” Indeed the novel’s enormous size and chaotic seemed to emerge from the explosion of precisely such a combustible combination.

But that’s not how the novel ends. While the plot of the novel does indeed begin to come together to some extent in the wake of Gately being shot, it never delivers what seems to be promised on pg. 17—Gately and Hal never really meet, and the various threads of the plot are left hanging. This blog post from “I Just Read About That” does a great job of summarizing the plot issues and trying to put it all together. But what are we to do with this ending?

One response is to try to answer all the unanswered questions by rereading the novel. Maybe what happens at the end is basically hidden throughout the rest of the novel. There are a number of very ingenious readings of the novel’s ending, which try to put together the novel’s details to bridge the gap between where the novel “ends” and where it “begins.” And there is indeed a lot that Wallace has managed to put into this novel that is not immediately obvious.

I am convinced by some of the attempts to answer certain questions by retracing hints dropped throughout the novel—readings that, for example, trace who was in possession of the master cartridges of the “Entertainment” and how they came to be in possession of them. But I don’t think that ferreting out plot details alone will render the novel’s ending completely satisfying. Even were one able to answer all the plot questions (and I’m skeptical that that is possbile), that wouldn’t really allow one to understand the novel and why it ends where it ends. What happens is a crucial question; but why is the question that fiction, unlike real life, can meaningfully toy with, if not fully answer.

Gerry Canavan suggests something similar, I think, when he describes the novel’s plot as a sort of seduction,

you can allow yourself to be seduced by the teasing but doomed impulse towards closure, the fantasy that answers to all the mysteries exist somewhere inside the book. . . . But the impulse to make this sort of over-interpretive effort is itself a kind of misreading of the novel, which is, we must recognize, explicitly anticonfluential along the theories of Himself’s own films.

I worry about writing off the pleasures of plot too quickly; elsewhere Wallace seems too sensitive to pleasures of plot to simply step away from them. But I basically agree with Gerry; many plot details are buried away in fascinating corners of the novel. But finally possessing them all will not really solve things. I don’t, however, follow Gerry’s anticonfluentialist reading of the novel.

So one solution to the novel’s apparently untidy ending (Infinite Detox calls the ending “a reader-hostile kick in the nuts”), is to reconstruct the missing coherence from implications and hints from elsewhere in the novel. Another is disavow coherence completely, to read coherence as Gerry does, as an Entertainment-like seduction to be resisted. Because the novel offers no tidy, definite ending, it is tempting to read Infinite Jest as an instance of what the novel describes at one point as “anticonfluentialism.” I find such a reading, though, at odds with the novel in other ways. Endnote 61 describes anticonfluentialism as “An après-garde digital movement, a.k.a. ‘Digital Parallelism’ and ‘Cinema of Chaotic Stasis,’ characterized by a stubborn and possibly intentionally irritating refusal of different narrative lines to merge into any kind of meaningful confluence” (996). To my mind this is not simply a delightful red-herring, but a deliberate provocation on Wallace’s part (there are other such moments in the novel I think).

The pretensions of certain “avant-garde” artists, and the academics who discuss such work, are a regular point of satire for Wallace (as indeed they are to J.O.I. himself whose “found drama” provides one of the novel’s funniest bits of satire). The references to “anticonfluentialism,” rather than offering a model for how we should understand Wallace’s novel, provide an object lesson in exactly how not to understand it. The references to anticonfluentialism are prophylactic, vaccinating a reader against a particular understanding of Infinite Jest.

Rather than seeing the novel as either fulfilling or defying traditional expectations of plot, I’d like to suggest the novel ends by shifting the criteria of a meaningful ending. Rather than the plot, it is the narratives of Hal and Gately which hold it together, albeit not in the way that I had assumed they would. The long concluding passages about Gately which bring the novel to an end allow us to see Gately in the very condition that we find Hal at the novel’s the beginning, reaching something like “rock bottom” (I’d apologize for that cliché but… ). The novel therefore, in the same period of narrated time, is able to simultaneously tell the story of Gately’s recovery and Hal’s decline, twisting them together as two sides of a single mobius strip.

“So yo then man what’s your story?” is the question that ends the novel’s first chapter, a question that returns repeatedly throughout the AA meetings. Against the model of narrative as sheer entertainment, what one finds in the question “what’s your story?” is an ethical commitment to others by patiently listening. This, I think, is where the novel leaves us, preferring a mode of engaged ethical narrative to one of self-enclosed narrative pleasure.

While I don’t plan on rereading the novel again too soon, when I eventually reread it I will be paying much closer attention to J.O. Incandenza, for it is J.O.I. (as wraith) who most concretely accomplishes what I wanted from Wallace—that is,he brings Hal and Gately together. And rather than anticonfluentialism it seems as though annulation is the novel’s governing structure—Infinite Tasks suggests something similar in his excellent discussion of the novel’s conclusion.

And J.O.I. remains a compelling and difficult figure. Looking back over the novel, it is not the J.O.I. the film-maker who intrigues me, so much as J.O.I. the scientist. The references to J.O.I., director of the Entertainment, may mask another, equally crucial version of J.O.I.—the one concerned with annulation, and to whom the novel lends its own voice in a chapter near the center of the book in which the discovery of annulation seems to emerge from out of family trauma (491 – 503). (This chapter, to my mind, might be the most amazing stretch of writing in the entire novel, though I understand that this is a minority opinion.)

So, after all that reading, what is one really to make of a novel like Infinite Jest? Having finished it, and thought about it for a while, I remain convinced that it is a remarkable novel. I’m unsure that I could recommend it without reservation. For people who love reading big novels, it is wonderful. That said, it is a very demanding novel and I have a hard time recommending it, when short little gems like Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground and Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier are available and pack quite a wallop.

In bidding adieu to this novel, for now, I must lend my voice to the many others who have praised Infinite Summer for organizing a summer-long reading of Wallace’s novel. The persistent hum of twitter chatter on #infsum provided a comforting, ATHSCME fan-like, reminder of a world of readers beyond one’s own limited experience of the novel. Some of the best commentary on the novel came not from Infinite Summer itself but from the blogs which cropped up around it, some of which I’ve noted in the sidebar.

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On Endnotes and Infinite Jest

August 25, 2009 in Infinite Jest, literature | 1 comment

Image from flickr use nickdouglas / cc license

Image from flickr use nickdouglas / cc license

I finished Infinite Jest about a week ago. (I proudly announced it on twitter; surprisingly, I have not yet received any fruit baskets or congratulatory Hallmark cards).

I immediately wrote up a blog post about things I wished I had done differently as I raced through the novel—things I wished I had paid more attention to and so on. Rereading that post though, it seemed to include, if only implicitly, spoilers. While I did not discuss any elements of the plot, I increasingly began to feel that saying anything about the ending of the novel preempts one’s own experience. So I revised and whittled it down to just some basic advice. But even that seemed like too much. In the end I decided it was best to simply pass over my feelings about the novel’s conclusion in silence. Once infinite summer winds down everyone will be talking about the novel’s conclusion, and at that point the discussion will be more interesting and satisfying anyway.

So instead, let’s try this for an IJ-related post: What’s up with those damn endnotes anyway?

This is not a particularly novel topic. After the novel’s length, it is Wallace’s use of endnotes that is the most frequently noted when people mention Infinite Jest (followed, I think, by feral hamsters). In the first Roundtable discussion of the book, for instance, the Infinite Summer readers discuss the novel’s endnotes, provoking some lively discussion in the comments.

Many people who discuss Wallace’s use of endnotes in IJ point to this passage from a New Yorker article on Wallace, which I quote at length.

In Bloomington, Wallace struggled with the size of his book. He hit upon the idea of endnotes to shorten it. In April, 1994, he presented the idea to Pietsch, adding, “I’ve become intensely attached to this strategy and will fight w/all 20 claws to preserve it.” He explained that endnotes “allow . . . me to make the primary-text an easier read while at once 1) allowing a discursive, authorial intrusive style w/o Finneganizing the story, 2) mimic the information-flood and data-triage I expect’d be an even bigger part of US life 15 years hence. 3) have a lot more technical/medical verisimilitude 4) allow/make the reader go literally physically ‘back and forth’ in a way that perhaps cutely mimics some of the story’s thematic concerns . . . 5) feel emotionally like I’m satisfying your request for compression of text without sacrificing enormous amounts of stuff.” He also said, “I pray this is nothing like hypertext, but it seems to be interesting and the best way to get the exfoliating curve-line plot I wanted.” Pietsch countered with an offer of footnotes, which readers would find less cumbersome, but eventually agreed.

I quote this passage in its entirety because it is so interesting, opening onto broader avenues of pursuit. What exactly is Wallace’s antipathy towards hypertext? (Perhaps a reaction to the recent fad of George Landow’s Hypertext, the first edition of which was published in 1992). I assume “Finneganizing” means “to-make-like-Finnegans Wake“, but that doesn’t explain a lot (perhaps it suggests rendering the story subservient to style?). Describing the plot as an “exfoliating curve-line” is suggestive and worthy of further explanation. Pietsch’s suggestion that footnotes would be easier to read than endnotes is one that I imagine many readers appreciate; though long notes (like J.O. Incandenza’s filmography) would have been impossible as footnotes. (For folks looking for the canonical discussion of the “virtues” and “vices” of end- and footnotes, see The Chicago Manual of Style, sections 16.19 through 16.24; nothing offered there is so interesting that I’ll actually quote from it; but it’s all there should you wish to consult.)

All of which is interesting, but I want to focus on something else: the uniquely academic provenance of the footnote (which, I think, is implicit in Wallace’s 1, 2, & 3). As Wallace’s list makes clear, the endnotes serve no single function. Some notes are sly jokes, but by the end of the novel whole chapters are relocated to endnotes—the endnote hanging in empty space, deprived even of a particular piece of text to annotate. Such a note becomes a sort of brute command to the reader to jump through the physical material of the novel. But these interesting descriptions of how endnotes operate in the novel (of what it feels like to read a novel with endnotes) ignore what an endnote is.

A footnote/endnote is a uniquely academic device, invented in order to provide documentation. Particularly in the field of history, the footnote played a key role in formalizing inquiry by providing a regularized method for connecting one text to another, and thereby (if we accept the premise underlying such annotation) to the world itself (see Anthony Grafton’s The Footnote: A Curious History, which I would quote if it weren’t currently checked out of the library). This academic lineage, of course, remains visible in Wallace’s use of endnotes in IJ. Its endnotes often provide technical details regarding drugs, copyright and trademark information, or citations of works (many of which are fictional; both playing on, and undermining, the “verisimilitude” Wallace claims). Indeed, the filmography, which is contained in an endnote, is itself a thoroughly academic genre.

So what?

Well one could connect the endnote to larger questions about the relationship of fiction to the world (of maps to territories) or to “the textual nature of truth itself” that is increasingly evident in the “postmodern condition” Wallace’s novel describes. (Did that pastiche of academicisms work? )

One could. But I’d like to resist that as well. As others have noted, the use of endnotes is not unique to IJ, but instead it seems to be a key part of Wallace’s style, in his nonfiction as well as his fiction. The endnote/footnote, it would seem, is a key part of Wallace’s identity as a writer, and marks the position of the writer in contemporary culture. That is, the writer’s connection with the University. Wallace’s biography gives many instances of his own connections to the University (his degree in philosophy, his MFA; his family; his own career as a university teacher); all of which are merely instances of the cultural ground upon which Wallace’s style grew, a style and tone that seems in constant productive tension with the academic temperament.

The endnote, in this sense, is a less a stylistic device than a marker of the writer’s place in contemporary culture. Wallace, and his footnotes, might be inserted within the larger trend of post-WWII American writing that emerges in the wake of the development of Creative Writing MFA programs.

Wallace’s endnotes, of course, have an ambivalent relationship to this academic pedigree. They at once rely on the academic tradition of notation they reference, but also poke fun at the pretensions of such reference. Or consider Wallace’s most “academic” work: Everything and More (which I have not finished); a work that is academic in its resolutely educational aims, but that is nevertheless impatient with academic convention in its conversational tone. The book reads a little like Pemulis’s discussion of the Mean Value Theorem—only by someone with greater mathematical acumen. (It shares Pemulis’s enormous enthusiasm for his subject matter).

A larger discussion of the role of the University, and the representation of academics in IJ would make this post too long. Recall only that Avril is an academic or J. O. Incandenza’s playful attitude toward academic film critics or Molly Notkin’s party (in which grad students are gently satirized); here we have clear instances of the way in which the academia impinges upon the novel.

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