The Legacy of David Foster Wallace

All Swallowed Up: David Foster Wallace and American Literature

 3 Paul Giles All Swallowed Up: David Foster Wallace and Amer ican Liter atur e The idea of “AmericanLiterature”asanareaofprofessionalexpertise has had a checkered history. When this academic field was first mooted in the late nineteenth century, as Gerald Graff has observed, it tended to be regarded condescendingly by the Ivy League establishment as something suitable only for more populist forms of education in women’s colleges or remote state universities (211); indeed, it was not until the 1920s, in the work ofNormanFoersterandothers,thatthesubjectbeganproperly to take on nationalistic contours rather than being identified simply with local color and other sectional interests. Writing under the shadow of World War I, when patriotic sentiment had been heightened within the scholarly as well as the political community, Foerster argued that American literature should seek to identify key nationalist tropes—“the Puritan tradition” (27), “the frontier spirit” (27), “romanticism” (32), and “realism” (34)—in the same way that Harvard professor Frederick Jackson Turner had recently invoked the significance of the frontier as crucial to the constitution of American history. The scholarly journal American Literature, founded in 1929, helped consolidate this process of institutionalization, and it was not until the last twenty years of the twentieth century that the nomenclature “American” came to be understood as problematic, since the increasing visibility of transnational flows across national boundaries exposed the ambiguity whereby the termcouldrefertoeitheracountryoracontinent;indeed,morerecently the category “U.S. Literature” has enjoyed increasing prominence. My 4 history argument here, though, is that the work of David Foster Wallace meditates self-­ consciously on what it means to be an “American” writer at the turn of the twenty-­ first century. Wallace’s writing, I will suggest, emerges out of an intellectual heritage invested in quite traditional Americanist values, as adumbrated by Foerster: Transcendentalism, community spirit, self-­ reliance, and so on. At the same time, Wallace’s acute responsiveness to new digital environments, within which liberal individualism has become a shadow of its former self, creates in his narratives an inherently ironic framework, one that explores the mythic romance of America even while recognizing how such assumptions are coming to appear increasingly strange and unfamiliar. This ultimately coalesced with Wallace’s more philosophical interests in the limits of subjectivity and in how electronic grids of shared experience operated in the age of mass media; his writing sought effectively to remodel the idea of a romantic subject across an extended communal domain, one bearing a residual attachment to traditional American values, even within a globalized world where such partitioned conceptions of identity had seemingly been rendered moot. In this sense, despite Wallace’s own intense sense of self-­protective privacy, he was paradoxically committed as an author to the idea of his work as expressing the concerns of a public intellectual. Aware of Wallace’s projection of himself as a public intellectual malgré lui, I myself had an exchange of e-­ mails with the author early in 2007, after I had invited him to Oxford University’s Rothermere American Institute, of which I was then director, to deliver our annual Esmond Harmsworth Lecture in American Arts and Letters. He first responded on 5 May 2007, saying, “I’ve been thinking about the Harms­ worth thing, with no small trepidation. I really do not know how to deliver a ‘lecture.’ The one thing remotely like this I’ve done has been a commencement address at a college here in the States, and that took me weeks to write.” However, Wallace also asked if we possessed transcripts or recordings of previous lectures, suggesting that “if I agreed to try to give a lecture on 15 May 2008, would you be willing to supply me with two or three transcripts/videotapes of such previous H.L.s so that I could get a concrete idea of what a Harmsworth Lecture actually looks 5 A ll Swa llow ed Up | Paul Giles or sounds like?” I replied that we had a general policy at the RAI of not recording anything, since we found this gave speakers—politicians, as well as writers—more freedom to share their ideas openly, without the intrusion of any legal or copyright issues. But I also indicated that we would be interested in something less formal than a regular academic lecture, perhaps a discussion of the kinds of things that interested him as a writer. After thinking this over for a few days, Wallace came back to...