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  • The Archival Turn
  • Michael Pawluk (bio)
David Foster Wallace: Fiction and Form
David Hering
Bloomsbury Publishing
www.blomsbury.com/us
216 Pages; Print,
$77.00

It is fitting that David Hering's latest book—David Foster Wallace: Fiction and Form—opens with a discussion of the monograph form, describing it as "the most appropriate mode in which to substantially address the extraordinary body of work to be found in Wallace's archive of drafts, letters and personal library of books." Accordingly, he identifies with the third "wave" of Wallace studies, the "archival turn," and acknowledges that he has contributed another single-author monograph on Wallace at a time when such projects are enjoying their greatest popularity. However, Hering's project is easily distinguished from those of his contemporaries.

Hering aims to provide "the most complete close analysis of Wallace's composition yet," tracing four central motifs—vocality, spatiality, visuality, and finality—throughout the whole of Wallace's work. He is successful in this goal at least in part because of his considerable breadth of examination; he systematically parses everything Wallace published, both fiction, nonfiction, and the transcriptions of Wallace's major interviews. Supplementing this material is the Wallace archive held by the University of Texas, which Hering considers a separate "text" in its "volume and complexity." Hering draws on the entirety of the archive—Wallace's drafts, a large amount of unpublished material, his correspondence, and the marginalia from the books in his personal library—for his close readings, often using the material contained therein to provide a new perspective on what seemed to be the final word in Wallace studies.

This impetus toward open-endedness is particularly Bakhtinian and shapes much of Hering's scholarship, for he takes dialogism as a central organizing principle of his project. He focuses on the ideas from The Dialogic Imagination, and though Hering has argued for a Bakhtinian analysis of Wallace since 2011, he remains one of the only Wallace scholars to make this connection, even though Wallace himself noted that Bakhtin was a significant theoretical influence—adding to the polyphonic nature of Hering's analysis. Those who have read Bakhtin and Wallace together have generally written on the latter's "sustained use of dialogue in his fiction"; Hering, however, reads "monologism and dialogism in Wallace's fiction as occurring within an ongoing process of oscillation that is based around the continual risk of a master discourse engendered by the degree of Wallace's authorial presence." This oscillation serves as a "continual modification and clarification" of his authorial presence, something Wallace was continually preoccupied with throughout his life, and it manifests itself not only "in degrees of direct authorial visibility in the text," but "at the level of spatial and visual form." These three manifestations comprise, respectively, the first three chapters of the monograph; the fourth is a chronological and archival reading of The Pale King. Fittingly, Hering argues that Wallace's "documentary mass"—his usable archival materials—and the "text" that it embodies was largely created "via this dialogic process of self-criticism and amendment." Such a dialogic structure is therefore "fundamental to an understanding of the form of Wallace's fiction."

The first chapter, "Vocality," discusses Wallace's "dramatized instances of 'possession' and ghostliness that implicitly refer to the absence of presence of the dead, among whom can be found the 'spectral' figure of the author." This analysis, which culminates in Hering's theory of the "revenant author," is partially a response to Wallace's interaction with Barthes; partially an interpretation of the recursion of the spectral figure in Wallace's fiction; partially a means to discuss "Harold Bloom's ghostly inflected model of apophrades" (the "haunting" of influential works within a writer's oeuvre); and partially a continuation of his discussion of Bakhtinian dialogism. The latter serves as Hering's guiding process from point to point because Hering believes "that reading Wallace in relation to Bakhtin provides a sustained career-length model by which to map the problems of authorial monologism staged by the motifs of possession and ghostliness in the fiction." Though Hering applies his characteristic breadth of analysis to this chapter, it focuses...

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