Matt Bucher is the administrator of the David Foster Wallace mailing list and publisher of Elegant Complexity: A Study of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. He is an editor at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, runs a weblog about writer Roberto Bolaño and the novel 2666, and has read Infinite Jest at least three times.
Infinite Jest is an original novel. I mean that in every sense of the word. Wallace has constructed an original novel that is imaginative and fresh; each storyline drips with his distinctive style. It also is the origin point for a new type of novel writing, a path others want to follow. Let me go back and repeat part of that: Wallace has constructed an original novel. The act of constructing a novel of this size and scope invariably involves some degree of borrowing bits and pieces–either from one’s own drafts and notebooks, or from the writing of others–and stitching together many smaller pieces.
In addition to Wallace borrowing from his own work (c.f. Antitoi mentioned in his 1992 Harper’s essay “Tennis, Trigonometry, Tornadoes” (collected in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments and available in PDF here), many of the details in Infinite Jest owe something to one or other of the thousands of novels Wallace had digested up to that point. Some of these references are homages, some are Nabokovian red herrings, most are just delightful. There are obvious references like Hamlet and Marathe/Marat, but the four influences I’ve chosen to focus on below might not be immediately apparent to the first-time reader.
These influences will be familiar to the members of wallace-l and I give that community credit for unearthing most of these connections.
- The Liar’s Club by Mary Karr: The Bruce Green–Mildred Bonk scene early on (p. 39) introduces us to Tommy Doocey, “the infamous harelipped pot-and-sundries dealer who kept several large snakes in unclean uncovered aquaria, which smelled, which Tommy Doocey didn’t notice because his upper lip completely covered his nostrils and all he could smell was lip.” Compare that description with page 76 from The Liar’s Club (1995), (a memoir, by the way): “I knew a drug dealer once who collected [snakes] in glass tanks all over his trailer. He had a harelip that somehow protected him from the stink, but the rest of us became, when dickering over pharmaceuticals with him, the noisiest and most adenoidal mouth breathers. We all sounded like Elmer Fudd, so a coke deal took on a cartoonlike quality: ‘You weally tink dis is uncut?’ It was particularly hard to talk this way when you were tripping your brains out on LSD and had gone there only as a last resort to buy something to help you come down.” Now, Karr and Wallace were an item (per The New Yorker and The Washington Post), but there’s no telling if he picked that bit up from Karr’s book or if he himself went to one of those buys at the real Doocey’s place. Karr’s version is arguably funnier.
- End Zone by Don Delillo: It would not be unfair to call End Zone the biggest literary influence on Infinite Jest (at least the E.T.A. half). That is somewhat ironic since End Zone is only 250 pages long. Several key details from EZ show up in IJ, but the biggest is probably the concept of Eschaton. The main character of EZ, Gary Harkness, is obsessed with nuclear strategy. He repeatedly mentions the term eschatology. DT Max tells us that one of the original titles of End Zone was “Modes of Disaster Technology.”
Some other similarities:
- The militaristic coach in a tower looming over the field;
- The players (football college rather than tennis academy) over-intellectualizing their roles and future success;
- The widow of the founder is the president of the school;
- The powdered milk.
Wallace and Delillo both spent time in Texas (the setting for End Zone)–Wallace on a Lannan grant in Marfa (you can read more about Wallace in Marfa in Sean Wilsey’s book Oh the Glory of It All) and Delillo researching Libra in Dallas (Delillo’s wife is from Texas).
There are dozens of other nods to Delillo’s other books throughout Wallace’s work (“The Broom of the System” is similar to a phrase in Americana, the M.I.T. Language Riots are mentioned in Ratner’s Star, etc.) and the Ransom Center in Austin owns a set of correspondence between Wallace and Delillo.
- Red Dragon by Thomas Harris: Consider these two passages:
Red Dragon: “[The gun] was a Bulldog .44 Special, short and ugly with its startling big bore. It had been extensively modified by Mag Na Port. The barrel was vented near the muzzle to help keep the muzzle down on recoil, the hammer was bobbed and it had a good set of fat grips. He suspected it was throated for the speedloader.” (RD, p. 137)Infinite Jest: “The Item’s some customized version of a U.S. .44 Bulldog Special…blunt and ugly with a bore like the mouth of a cave…The piece’s been modified, Gately can appraise. The barrel’s been vented out near the muzzle to cut your Bulldog’s infamous recoil, the hammer’s bobbed, and the thing’s got a fat Mag Na Port or -clone grip like the metro Finest favor…It’s not a semiauto but is throated for a fucking speed-loader….” (IJ, pp. 609-610)
Wallace was admittedly a big fan of Harris’s writing. And he confesses that he loved the technical details of Tom Clancy novels. In this list Wallace included two Thomas Harris novels in his top 10. (A lot of people think DFW was joking or something when compiling that list, but I’m telling you it’s sincere.) I think this is a place where Wallace needed a detail about a beefy gun and either remembered or came across this in Red Dragon and ran with it.
- Super Mario Brothers: OK, this seems like a stretch and it’s not literary, but bear with me. Mario Incandenza, the middle child, is a “small hunched shape with a big head” (p. 32), extremely short, but he has a big head, an oversized skull on a little body. He sort of looks like Super Mario. And then there’s this on page 42:
“Remember the flag only halfway up the pole? Booboo, there are two ways to lower a flag to half-mast. Are you listening? Because no shit I really have to sleep here in a second. So listen — one way to lower the flag to half-mast is just to lower the flag. There’s another way though. You can also just raise the pole. You can raise the pole to like twice its original height. You get me? You understand what I mean, Mario?”
For those of you who lived without electricity in Siberia during the late 1980s, the game Super Mario Brothers featured a character named Mario jumping up to a flagpole at the end of every level.
Later, walking with Schtitt:
Mario thinks of a steel pole raised to double its designed height and clips his shoulder on the green steel edge of a dumpster, pirouetting halfway to the cement before Schtitt darts in to catch him, and it almost looks like they’re doing a dance-floor dip as Schtitt says this game the players are all at E.T.A. to learn, this infinite system of decisions and angles and lines Mario’s brothers worked so brutishly hard to master: junior athletics is but one facet of the real gem: life’s endless war against the self you cannot live without.
So, Mario’s brothers play a game, but now Mario, not Hal, is the focal point–these are Mario’s brothers. (With respect to the Incandenza brothers, another connection here is with The Brothers Karamazov. Timothy Jacobs wrote his dissertation at McMaster University partly on comparing the Brothers Incandenza with the Brothers Karamazov.) The connection between Mario Incandenza and Super Mario Brothers is by no means rock solid, but the short, dark-haired Mario concentrating on that flagpole sure does conjure an image worthy of it.
For those to lazy to click the link, here are Wallace’s top ten novels:
The blogger and commenters speculate that this might be a joke, but I’m with Bucher in believing it’s sincere. For one thing, Wallace made his position on “irony” pretty clear: not a fan. For another, I can’t imagine Wallace listing the same author twice if this was meant as a gag.
But what really sells it to me is the top two choices. We know from The View from Mrs. Thompson’s that Wallace was a religious man (or a church-goer, at the least), and The Screwtape Letters combines the Christian faith with the analytical process that Wallace so loved. The novel also has a very This-Is-Waterian message at its core.
As for The Stand, I do not find it hard to believe that Wallace would enjoy huge, epic novels full of meticulously fleshed-out characters and uncannily authentic dialogue.
I dont think that list is ironic, but i also dont think its completely sincere. Although it says favorite so these are maybe simply the ones he enjoyed reading most.
In a very early post this summer, someone posted a link to a Wallace syllabus for a course he was teaching in 2005. Check it out at this blog: http://alasophia.blogspot.com/2008/09/david-foster-wallaces-syllabus.html
I would think that these are more than just books he thought were fun if he’s using them as teaching tools: “Silence of the Lambs” is a part of this course.
If you think of the DFW who, in his most famous essays, made such a sincere attempt to try to “get” the people around him as they pursued activities that he knew he (by nature and/or education and/or choice and/or circumstance) had become at least a little bit isolated/abstracted/otherwise separated from (state fair, cruise ship, even, a bit, the community of neighbors in “The View from Mrs. Thompson’s”), The DFW who, in IJ, takes so seriously the task of understanding what works — what really and truly matters and works — for the addicts whose background, education, etc, seem so far from his own (even as he shared, as we now know, their problems with substances), it is not hard to imagine where the top 10 list comes from. Yeah, he was capable of producing the list of works he gave Laura Miller in the Salon interview with great sincerity, but he was also capable of, I think, enjoying popular fiction, and, like the crocodiles listening to new AA speakers, of realizing when what he was reading was somehow managing to be particularly true to its own goals and experience and successfully reaching out to the needs, uncynically understood, of its readers. One thing I think you can say about all the writers on this list — which includes, among others, an Oxford don, a Maine autodidact, an unapologetic right wing/conservative-leaning lover of military history, an equally unapologetic chronicler of the subjective experience of boomer feminism and self-actualization movements — is that they are sincere in their obsessions, their need to examine their own experience and in their desires to communicate, even when they risk looking silly or being dismissed. It isn’t hard to imagine these books being touchstone books, books people have deep emotional investments in, for lots of people. And these writers and their books don’t seem to have much in the way of demagogic or personality-cult goals in how they accomplish this: Heinlein could be a freak, but he was no L. Ron Hubbard, and while Clancy, Jong, Harris, among others, are capable of extreme eccentricities on certain topics, none of them carry that whiff of bad-faith cruelty that radiates out from the Ayn Rands of the world. These are all authors capable of finding ways to communicate the nuances of “I am in here” without it turning into “Me! Me! Me! Me!”
In the bio in the New Yorker that ran earlier this year it talks about his love of the detail Tom Clancy goes into in his novels. He apparently would talk about Clancy books with awe. I’m not surprised by this list at all.
Is there any way to access this master’s thesis? That would be a treat. Also, I recall a piece in rolling stone wherein tom clancy’s mentioned as being read (with his mother or sister) during a cross-country trip.
It’s actually a PhD dissertation. A version of that chapter was published in the Fall 2007 Texas Studies in Literature and Language as “The Brothers Incandenza: Translating Ideology in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov and David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest.” If you can get University or Library access to Project Muse, they should have it.
If I’m not mistaken, Elegant Complexity was authored by Greg Carlisle.
Yes, Greg is the author of the book and I am the editor & publisher of the book.
Ah, whoops, sorry Matt – I was not aware that you were involved with its publication **hangs head in embarrassment**.
I’m confused about this – where was Elegant Complexity mentioned? Is the dissertation discussed in it?
I think good old neon brought it up because it’s mentioned in my bio. It has nothing to do with Jacobs’ dissertation.
I’d say that The Broom of the System is not a reference to DeLillo. If DeLillo also uses it, then they both stole it from Wittgenstein.
Wallace also said in an interview that it was his grandmother’s term for roughage (“Carrots and celery really clean you out!” They’re the broom of the system!”)
yeah in the RollingStone “Death of a Genius” article he also mentioned his mother’s calling an apple ‘the broom of the system’…
btw does anyone have the PDF for the essay ‘a supposedly fun thing…’
I believe the links to the original Harper’s articles on their memorium page still work:
http://harpers.org/archive/2008/09/hbc-90003557
(original title of the piece was “Shipping Out: On the (nearly lethal) comforts of a luxury cruise”)
Odd that Don Delillo, Cormac McCarthy and other DFW favorites didn’t make the list. However, I do know that he used “Silence of the Lambs” as material for one of his literature classes at Pomona College.
Mary Karr was my favorite teacher at Syracuse University. I read her memoir years ago and didn’t know that she dated David Foster Wallace. She was crazy but a really fascinating woman and teacher!
I am gratified in a way that I should probably find embarrassing to share a few “favorite” novels with my favorite author. (Though I prefer “Till We Have Faces” to “The Screwtape Letters.”)
Hi Dan –
I haven’t read “Till We Have Faces” (but now will) but would heartily recommend “The Great Divorce” over “Screwtape.”
Wow – that paragraph from Red Dragon is pretty darn close to plagiarism isn’t it?
You bring up a really interesting point. How would you say the description compares to, say, sampling of a guitar hook or lyric or some such in a rap song. It’s not like Infinite Jest in any other way resembles Red Dragon.
But it’s an interesting point, isn’t it? And it hearkens back to the IS discussion from sometime in June about Wallace’s perfectly plagiaristic use of the load of bricks urban legend.
Yes, and it seems to be the elephant in the room.
But I don’t think it’s the elephant, because it’s so easy to talk about/and to discover. It brings to mind that great J Lethem article in Harper’s not long ago, re plagiarism (“The Ecstasy of Influence”).
I once read/heard DFW write/say something like: “Writers are kleptomaniacs with really good taste.”
Check out Lawrence Lessig’s writing for an interesting perspective on copyright and art. He essentially believes that creativity thrives best in an environment where you can build upon other creative works, essentially changing them at their core. I think of plagiarism as a situation where someone passes off someone else’s work as their own. But historically, lots of great art takes someone else’s work and modifies it to serve a different purpose. (Think Sherrie Levine, Richard Prince, the Dadaists, even Picasso.)
I’ve always loved this Jim Jarmusch quote: “Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is nonexistent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery—celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: ‘It’s not where you take things from—it’s where you take them to.’”
thnx Doubtful Geste that Harper’s link is a DFW goldmine!
“Infinite Jest” actually represents a fairly common type of postmodern novel centered around a quest for a missing text, and like the cartridge in “Infinite Jest,” the missing text often has the same name as the book the readers is reading. The search is often presented in the form of a mystery or even a noirish Raymond Chandler-type detective story.
A few examples I can think of offhand (with the missing text in parentheses) are:
“The Shadow of the Wind” by Carlos Ruiz Zafon (The Shadow of the Wind by Julián Carax)
“Snow” by Orhan Pamuk (a volume of poetry called Snow by Ka, the novel’s narrator)
“Cloud Atlas” by David Mitchell (each of the six novellas that make up the book has a missing text that shows up in a subsequent novella but the title is shared with a fictional piece of music called the Cloud Atlas Sextet)
“if on a winter’s night a traveler…” by Italo Calvino (one of Mitchell’s models for Cloud Atlas, it contains many false inner novels, however, the word “traveler” in the title of the fictional inner novel is spelled with two “L”s)
“The Name of the Rose” by Umberto Eco (hate to give it away, but the sought-after text is the lost second book of Aristotle’s Poetics, Aristotle’s treatise on comedy)
“The Intuitionist” by Colson Whitehead (the text is called Theoretical Elevators by James Fulton)
“Mumbo Jumbo” by Ishmael Reed (is a search for the text to Jes Grew. Intentionally paradoxical because Jes Grew represents oral culture)
Some of these books are allegorical, some are more politicized or more satirical than others, but their commonalities may include: genre-crossing, the de-emphasis of distinctions between high and low culture, the relationship between fiction and life etc. But the “quest” or the search for a “text” that they all have in common is a commentary on literature and language itself, a parody of all the assumptions about unity of structure and unity of meaning in earlier literary styles. I have a background in music, not literature, so I’m not going to cite any literary theory that I haven’t thoroughly studied, however, despite the merits of these works, it’s fairly obvious that they’re all using the same template so they’re not all that original.
“The Anxiety of Influence” was Harold Bloom’s theory that literary influence was not straightforward, but rather, Oedipal in nature. Although I can’t say I’ve read Bloom’s book, it recalls the relationship between Richard Wright and James Baldwin, who, in his first published piece, “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” attacked and completely dissociated himself from his former mentor and ended their friendship. Or Norman Podhoretz in his review of Ralph Ellison’s “Juneteenth,” claiming that Ellison was unable to finish the novel because of Faulkner’s influence over him. Those are what I take to be examples of what Bloom calls the anxiety of influence. I’ll keep my eye open for the book. Thanks.
Re Matt Evans above:
“It’s not like Infinite Jest in any other way resembles Red Dragon.”
Actually, there are at least two other notable similarities. For one, Red Dragon has a character named Randy who is spotted by Will (Red Dragon’s protagonist) as being a knife owner because he has shaved patches on his forearm where he tests the sharpness of his knife’s blade. IJ has, of course, a character also named Randy (Lenz), and there is a passage where Gately spots Lenz as a knife owner for exactly the same reason.
More significantly, I think the entire ending sequence of IJ owes a significant debt structurally to Red Dragon. I summarized that similarity in this comment on another blog.