The Legacy of David Foster Wallace

Conclusion: Observations on the Archive at the Harry Ransom Center

 241 Molly Schwartzburg Conclusion: Observations on the Archive at the Har ry R ansom Center The papers and library of David Foster Wallace arrived at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin in late 2009. As curator of the British and American literature collections at the Ransom Center, I have watched these materials travel through the stages of cataloging and housing required to make them available to researchers and students. Before and since they opened in September 2010, the papers have been the source of extraordinary interest among readers, scholars, journalists, and the center’s own staff. Like James Joyce, another writer with extensive holdings at the Ransom Center, Wallace inspires a deep intellectual and personal dedication among those who have read his major works, particularly Infinite Jest. (By the time this essay is published, many of those readers will also have read The Pale King, which will be published about six months from today.1) The Ransom Center’sJoyce holdingscontinuetodrawalargenumberofscholars,and we continue to acquire significant Joyce materials almost seventy years after the writer’s death. We cannot foresee Wallace’s place in the literary canon circa 2078 or how many more Wallace-­related collections we will have acquired by that date. What we do know is that scholarly work in the newly opened papers and library will very soon begin to transform the already significant body of scholarship on both Wallace’s work and his biography. The work of special collections might arguably be boiled down to one word: mediation. With our dual mission of providing access to and 242 Conclusion extending the lifespan of the precious materials entrusted to us, everything we do is an attempt to best protect not just the artifact but also any surviving evidence of its history and contexts that may be of value to researchers. In order to do so, we surround the artifact (such as, in Wallace ’s case, a dictionary, essay draft, letter, airplane reservation, Alcoholics Anonymous guide, award certificate, etc.) with materials that identify it and protect it (physical material like archival folders and boxes, and digital metadata like database entries, EAD-­ encoded archival inventories , and MARC catalog records2). These materials are provided to researchers and students wrapped in yet another layer, this time one of specialized social conventions (researcher orientations and reading room handling guidelines) inside a reading room that is itself designed specifically to hold the artifact and its reader. Exhibitions, lectures, performances , symposia, blog posts, and other projects undertaken by the center further mediate these materials. Readers of Wallace, of all writers, are likely to appreciate the interest that mediation holds for special collections librarians and archivists, in both theory and practice. Wallace, of course, had an enduring interest in the idea of mediation. The essay “Host,” the footnote filmography in Infinite Jest, and the “Author’s Note” chapter in The Pale King come to mind as the most explicit examples of his own engagement with the concept in published works. The archive paints a fuller picture of this enduring concern. There, for instance, one can see Wallace’s extraordinary instructions to copy editors regarding the smallest details of punctuation and wording. Where most writers will defer to a publisher’s or magazine’s house style, Wallace insists upon precise and often eccentric variants, resulting in texts that gently but repeatedly nudge the reader into remembering the fact of reading while he is reading. So, to be explicit about how we at the Ransom Center have and will continue to mediate researchers’ access to Wallace’s papers and books seems particularly salient. Archival institutions are always caught in a challenging mediatory tug-­of-­war.Ontheonehand,weseektoavoidimposingourexpectations of scholarly use upon our cataloging of a particular collection, knowing from experience that researchers will walk in the door with needs we 243 Molly Schwartzburg could never imagine, whether they arrive tomorrow or in fifty years. On the other hand, we must mediate the materials to some degree. Even the simplest fact of how one names a collection mediates it, and naming must be at least somewhat consistent across collections—and among institutions—for the naming to be meaningful and useful. In this essay, I will not interpret the collection contents or forecast its likeliest uses by researchers, for doing so will surely doom me to failure. Rather, my effort will be descriptive: to explain the specific ways that Wallace’s materials have...