The Legacy of David Foster Wallace

Becoming Yourself: The Afterlife of Reception

 151 Ed Finn Becoming Yourself: The After life of R eception If there is one thing to be learned from David Foster Wallace, it is that cultural transmission is a tricky game. This was a problem Wallace confronted as a literary professional, a university-­ based writer during what Mark McGurl has called the Program Era. But it was also a philosophical issue he grappled with on a deep level as he struggled to combat his own loneliness through writing. This fundamental concern with literature as a social, collaborative enterprise has also gained some popularity among scholars of contemporary American literature, particularly McGurl and James English: both critics explore the rules by which prestige or cultural distinction is awarded to authors (English; McGurl). Their approach requires a certain amount of empirical work, since these claims move beyond the individual experience of the text into forms of collective reading and cultural exchange influenced by social class, geographical location, education, ethnicity, and other factors. Yet McGurlandEnglish’sgroundbreakingworkislimitedbytheveryforms of exclusivity they analyze: the protective bubble of creative writing programs in the academy and the elite economy of prestige surrounding literary prizes, respectively. To really study the problem of cultural transmission, we need to look beyond the symbolic markets of prestige to the real market, the site of mass literary consumption, where authors succeed or fail based on their ability to speak to that most diverse and complicated of readerships: the general public. Unless we study what I call the social lives of books, we make the mistake of keeping literature 152 Commu nit y in the same ascetic laboratory that Wallace tried to break out of with his intense authorial focus on popular culture, mass media, and everyday life. Tracing the social lives of books in the sphere of popular consumption requires extensive empirical research and would probably be impossible to accomplish in any kind of complete way. Instead, what I will offer here is a case study or core sample of Wallace’s cultural reception in particular areas of the literary marketplace drawn from a project exploring the changing nature of literary culture in the digital era (Finn). My larger argument is that millions of cultural consumers are now empowered to participate in previously closed literary conversations and to express forms of taste through their purchases and reviews of books. These traces of popular reading choices constitute a fresh perspective on elusive audience reactions to literature, one that reveals distinct networks of conversation that are transforming the relationships between writers and their readers, between the art of fiction and the market for books. Employing network analysis methodologies and “distant reading ” of book reviews, recommendations, and other digital traces of cultural distinction, I develop a new model for literary culture in America today. I will explain what this means in practical terms below, but I’d like to begin by offering three conjectures about Wallace that we can explore with empirical data, allowing us to make some grounded claims about Wallace’s ongoing literary impact. 1. Wallace is different: unlike contemporaries such as Jonathan Franzen, Richard Powers, Jonathan Lethem, or Michael Chabon , Wallace employs a style wildly divergent from that of any­ one else on the literary scene. He pioneered a radical new narrative voice so successfully that editors now complain about the endless pitches: “I’d like to do a David Foster Wallace take on ______” (Lipsky 320). As we will soon see, this uniqueness resulted in an oeuvre with a deep interiority to it, a cluster of texts that beckon readers almost invariably to read more Wallace, more of the “literary equivalent of cocaine” that they simply could not find anywhere else (Lipsky 157). 153 Becoming Yourself | Ed Fin n 2. Wallace is postmodern, not just in his thematic and stylistic approaches to narrative but in a historical sense; his books speak to Pynchon, Barth, and DeLillo in a way that they rarely do to younger novelists. The pointedly difficult style of massive, occasionally antagonistic tomes like Gravity’s Rainbow is magnified, footnoted, and distilled into Wallace’s own particular blend of militant cultural critique and eloquent despair. 3. Wallace is integral. Despite being so frequently lost in the funhouse of postmodern prose experiments, his earnest narrative approach aspires to the unity of experience as we perceive it—the ways in which we stitch together mediated fragments and jumbled thoughts into coherent stories of ourselves. This individual, intellectual definition of...