Global Wallace: David Foster Wallace and World Literature by Lucas Thompson (review)

When a piece of literary criticism makes you aware at every turn of the substantial limits not just of your knowledge of a subject—one you thought you knew something about—but also of the frameworks in which you think, its worth and importance are blindingly obvious. Such was my experience in reading Lucas Thompson's Global Wallace: David Foster Wallace and World Literature. Its well-researched and wide-ranging attention to Wallace's global influences and intertexts should also be a shot of adrenaline into a Wallace Studies that threatens to grow tired, from a steady infusion of hairsplitting arguments that place Wallace's work in the same much-explored contexts, often postmodernism and American culture. Thompson makes no claims for Wallace as exemplar of global comparativism as it is currently theorized; in fact, he clearly argues the opposite—that Wallace's voracious mind borrowed from an impressive diversity of writers from all over the world, but in every case was more interested in appropriating and universalizing than in preserving, or even exploring, geographic, cultural, or ethnic differences. But if Thompson demonstrates convincingly that Wallace's work should not be used to appreciate the singularity of each source from which he borrowed, he also argues compellingly that we must recognize and consider these various sources before we can begin to fully fathom Wallace's work.

Readers wishing to assess the book's intentions and usefulness for their purposes might start with its conclusion, which pithily (re-)presents the book's entire argument: rather than maintaining difference and alterity, making visible the marks of imperialism on culture or textual production, or investigating the telling ways in which writers position themselves in global contexts, Wallace pragmatically mined texts from outside the usual American–British nexus for new literary techniques and philosophical frameworks he could turn to his insular purpose of exploring and reviving American culture. Thompson thus aligns Wallace's stance in relation to global literature with Emerson's, and places it at sharp odds with appropriate reading practices as articulated by contemporary theorists including David Damrosch, Franco Moretti, Gayatri Spivak, and Wai Chee Dimock. Each chapter reads Wallace's work in relation to fiction emerging from a particular geographical region or subculture—Latin America, Russia, Eastern Europe, the "US South," and "African-American Appropriations"—first documenting the writers and texts from that area that Wallace read and/or taught, and listing allusions in his work to those writers, then theorizing the manner of Wallace's approach to that work, demonstrated via one or more case studies. This approach, while a bit repetitive, is helpful, offering clear ways to categorize Wallace's varying uses of a wide range of literary influences.

Thompson provides handy core concepts for each type of approach taken by Wallace: writer as software programmer, "scrambling and rewriting previous textual codes in order to create a synthetic mesh of diverse influences"; enlisting the "hologram" of a literary precursor, whose work acts as a "transparent overlay … for Wallace's text"; looking to a literary precursor as a "touchstone," or uncomplicated source of appropriation; completing another writer's Bloomian tessera, "in which a poet retains the categorical language of a precursor, but deploys such language in unexpected ways"; or working as a "hip-hop sampler, building bricolage-like narratives from a variety of cultural sources" (43–5). The amount of evidence Thompson marshals to make these arguments, and the diversity of sources from which he takes it, is impressive, and often deeply satisfying to readers well versed in Wallace's fiction and nonfiction, as well as, at times, delightfully surprising. Pulling with eagle-eyed attention from nooks and crannies of the Wallace archive and interviews, as well as from criticism spanning the entirety of Wallace studies, Thompson enlists Wallace's reactions to and analysis of global literature to provide fresh readings of both often-read and seldom-read Wallace texts. For example, Thompson interprets the lyrical...