The Conglomerate Era: Publishing, Authorship, and Literary Form, 1965–2007

In 1968, Time, Inc. purchased the publisher Little, Brown and Company. In 1989, Time merged with Warner Communications, and Little, Brown became a division of the new conglomerate Time Warner. In this, Little, Brown was not unique, riding waves of conglomeration in the publishing industry that submitted publishers to greater commercial pressures and compelled more attention to the bottom line. In 1992, Michael Pietsch, an editor at Little, Brown (now the CEO of Hachette Book Group), acquired what became David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. When it was ready for publication in 1996, Pietsch was tasked with making Wallace’s difficult novel a hit.

Pietsch and Little, Brown launched a hype campaign, a kind of literary striptease, sending a series of postcards to thousands of reviewers and booksellers that promised, among other things, “infinite pleasure.” It worked: Infinite Jest became a hit and Wallace a literary superstar. But the marketing and success unnerved Wallace. Worse, the novel’s commercial success marks its failure on its own terms. Infinite Jest is, at heart, pedagogical and moralistic, and it decries the destruction of American cultural life at the hands of corporate power and the hegemony of entertainment, like that produced by Time Warner. Nothing could be more antithetical to the novel’s project than the promise of infinite pleasure.

With his novel, Wallace attempted to negotiate, in conversation with his agent and editor, a precarious balance between entertainment and edification that would allow him to seduce readers while ultimately criticizing the culture of entertainment that Time Warner hoped to profit from by the novel’s publication. In his words, he wanted “to figure out how fiction can engage a reader, much of whose sensibility has been formed by pop culture, without simply becoming more shit in the pop culture machine” (61). This artistic position is occupied in the novel by James Incandenza, an avant-garde filmmaker whose ultimate ambition is to use his technical expertise to create a film so entertaining that it will, of necessity, draw his inbent son, Hal, out of himself. The film, called Infinite Jest, ends up being too entertaining: anyone who watches it dies from lack of desire to do anything ever again but watch the film. On one hand, unlike viewers of the eponymous film, many readers give up on Wallace’s novel after two hundred pages, just before the various plotlines begin to merge. On the other hand, Infinite Jest often makes readers—if they pass the two-hundred-page mark—insatiable in their desire for Wallace and his work. With its anticlimactic ending, Wallace aimed to deny the pleasures of catharsis in the hope of turning readers away from the novel and their inbent selves toward recognition of a common loneliness. He wanted his novel to serve as an antidote for a U.S. culture addicted to drugs and entertainment. That the novel remains a hit with a cult of addicted followers is ironic.

As a moment of literary history, Infinite Jest exhibits a complex formal response to changes in the publishing industry. Through attempting to position himself at the margins of literary trade publishing, criticizing its mandate to entertain, Wallace came to represent its core. Infinite Jest’s dialectic of entertainment and edification paved the way for Dave Eggers’s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and the culture of McSweeney’s, and for the autofiction whose displays of the anxieties of authorship have become central to negotiating this conglomerate-era dialectic and gaining prestige in the twenty-first century.¹

Little new here. Edification and entertainment: these were the terms of debate (more or less) in Plato’s Republic, Horace’s “Ars Poetica,” and Philip Sidney’s “An Apology for Poetry.” The dominant term shifts with the times. The conventional story has it that modernist literature aimed for relative autonomy from the market and its philistine demands, whereas postmodernism embraced the spectacle of commodification. We can line up these movements with developments in the publishing industry. Many of the major houses and editors of the twentieth century got their start publishing...