"I did a nice thing": David Foster Wallace and the Gift Economy

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The artist appeals to that part of our being which is a gift and not an acquisition—and, therefore, more permanently enduring. He speaks to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives; to our sense of pity, and beauty, and pain; to the latent feeling of fellowship with all creation.

Joseph Conrad
Nigger of the Narcissus

While david foster wallace only began writing seriously halfway through his undergraduate career, he experienced success at an extremely young age, an outcome he would later regret. Initially a self-described "hard-core syntax weenie," Wallace studied mathematical theory and modal logic at the University of Amherst until becoming exposed to avant-garde fiction, in particular Donald Barthelme's "The Red Balloon." Not until then, he admits, did he realize that those very special "clicks" one encounters in academia, described by a professor as "mathematical experiences," were essentially "aesthetic in nature, an epiphany in Joyce's original sense" (McCaffery 138). Ultimately, the work of fiction he submitted for his English honours thesis would later be published as The Broom of the System, a zany, Pynchonesque novel replete with clever pyrotechnics and allusions to Wittgenstein, from whom it receives its title.

However, as early as 1987, when he was obtaining his mfa at the University of Arizona, Wallace had grown ambivalent about the success and self-indulgent style of The Broom of the System. In 1993, he explained that the popularity of The Broom of the System mystified him, acknowledging, "there's a lot of stuff in that novel I'd like to reel back in and do better" (136). Much of his ambivalence involved the novel's penchant for what he identifies as narcissistic and egoistic writerly games that "deny" the essential fact that "the writer is over here with his agenda while the reader's over there … This paradox is what makes good fiction sort of magical, I think." Wallace laments, "The paradox can't be resolved, but it can somehow be mediated—re-mediated" (137 emphasis added). This remediation takes the form of Wallace re-imagining art as not performative and self-indulgent but, rather, as a gift.

At the same time he was reconsidering his own approach to fiction, Wallace began to also re-evaluate his attitudes toward the metafictional and postmodern writers whose techniques had influenced his debut novel. These authors, including Donald Barthelme, Thomas Pynchon, Robert Coover, and John Barth, had attracted the younger Wallace with their works' ironic humour, erudition, formal sophistication, and aesthetic innovation. As he became more critical of his own work, though, as well as the culture at large, Wallace began to question the effectiveness of these methods in a society dominated by corporate interests, marketing brands, and political cynicism. Ultimately, as he told David Lipsky about his time in late-80s Arizona:

I was just really stuck about writing … I didn't know whether I really loved to write or whether I'd just gotten some kind of excited about having some early success. The story at the end of Curious ["Westward the Course of Empire Goes Its Way"], which not a lot of people like, was really meant to be extremely sad. And to sort of be a kind of suicide note. And I think by the time I got to the end of that story, I figured I wasn't going to write anymore.

(61)

In "Westward," Mark Nechtr, Wallace's alter-ego, observes "metafiction is untrue, as a lover. It cannot betray. It can only reveal. Itself is its only object. It's the act of a lonely solipsist's self-love." Conversely, the narrator reveals, Mark Nechtr "desires, some distant hard-earned day, to write something that stabs you in the heart. That pierces you, makes you think you're going to die. Maybe it's called metalife. Or metafiction. Or realism. Or gfhrytytu. He doesn't know. He wonders who the hell really cares" (Girl With Curious Hair 332). If this story is a suicide note for a certain...