The Influence of Leo Tolstoy’s What Is Art? On David Foster Wallace’s Literary Project

ABSTRACT

This article argues that Tolstoy’s What Is Art? had a direct influence on David Foster Wallace’s conception of literature, and most specifically that Wallace appropriated Tolstoy’s discourse (down to most of its most specific details) to found his literary project. The article seeks to prove this by exhibiting the striking extent of Wallace’s alignment with Tolstoy’s beliefs, by retracing the multiple direct references to Tolstoy in Wallace’s work, and by uncovering Wallace’s annotations on his own copy of What Is Art? as further confirmation of what a careful comparative analysis of the works of the two authors makes manifest.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Hereafter WIA?.

2. In Global Wallace: David Foster Wallace and World Literature (2016), Lucas Thompson dedicates a chapter to Tolstoy’s influence on Wallace, but he focuses on the relationship between The Death of Ivan Ilyich and “Good Old Neon.”; Thompson does refer to WIA?’s clear influence on Wallace, but he doesn’t explore it at length and thus doesn’t illuminate its extent. He also limits Tolstoy’s influence to Wallace’s early period, which idea here we reject, recalling – among other things – that; Wallace referred to WIA? in “Deciderization 2007,” one of his latest writings.

3. When I realized the extent of WIA?’s direct influence on Wallace I didn’t know of the existence of the copy at the archive. My research at the Harry Ransom Center (HRC) only confirmed what I thought textual analysis shows in-itself. Thus, references to the copy will function only as secondary confirmations provided by the archival proof and will, therefore, all be unveiled in footnotes.

4. I owe these references to my colleague Luca Cortesi’s PhD thesis “La nechudožestvennaja proza di Velimir Chlebnikov: forme dichiarative, saggi, dialoghi” (“The Non-Fictional Prose of Velimir Khlebnikov: Declarative Forms, Essays, Dialogues,” my translation).

5. “E Unibus Pluram” (hereafter, EUP) is certainly Wallace’s main literary manifesto. Critics usually consider it as the main text of “the 1993 essay-interview nexus” (EUP plus the McCaffery interview) that they hold to constitute Wallace’s manifesto. Here, we argue that Wallace’s manifesto should rather be understood as a system of multiple essays and interviews. The system revolves around EUP and includes, at least, the essays “Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young” (an early version of EUP), “The Empty Plenum” (where Wallace praises David; Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress as a novel that obeys Wallace’s dicta about what literature should be), “David Lynch Keeps His Head” (where Wallace describes Lynch as his cinematic equivalent), and “Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky” (where Wallace describes Dostoevsky as the paradigmatic example of the ideal writer), and the interviews with McCaffery, Kennedy and Polk, and David Lipsky.

6. Wallace’s copy of WIA? available at the HRC is the 1978 Bobbs-Merrill first edition. Vincent Thomas opens the introduction by writing that WIA? “remains one of the most vigorous attacks upon formalism and the doctrine of art for art’s sake ever written” (vii). He explains that Tolstoy had written it to fight against “‘the dehumanization of art,’” its “depreciation of subject matter,” and “the ‘divorce of art from life’ that were to become more and more dominant features of ‘modern art’ in the twentieth century” (ibid.). Wallace underlines all of these passages, together with the vast majority of p. 49 (from “The inaccuracy of all these definitions” to “receive the same artistic impression”), where Tolstoy argues that the goal of true art is not pleasure but the betterment of human life through the establishment of communication between people. Here, Wallace brackets the sentence wherein Tolstoy says that the value of art resides in the “purpose it may serve in the life of man and of humanity,” and he draws a star next to it. The star was Wallace’s particular marking for what was of the greatest importance to him, and he seldom used it (there are three stars in his copy of WIA?). There is no doubt that he found inspiration here.

7. In his copy of WIA?, Wallace underlines both the introductory passage (page x) where Thomas explains Tolstoy’s art-food analogy (here Wallace annotates “Art & Food”) and virtually the entire last six paragraphs of chapter four (from “In order to define any human activity …” to the end of the chapter, 45–47), where all of Tolstoy’s above-cited passages appear. Here, Wallace again writes (in big characters) “Art & Food,” and frames it with a square (46). Finally, he underlines the full last paragraph of chapter sixteen, where Tolstoy describes true art as “real, important, necessary spiritual food” (159). All of this constitutes further proof that Wallace appropriated the art-food analogy directly from Tolstoy.

8. Our social ideals themselves depend on our metaphysical ideals, which is why in his copy of WIA? Wallace fully underlines all of Tolstoy’s above-cited passages (i.e. all that we have quoted here in both sections 4. and 5.). Also, Wallace strongly marks the passage “The estimation of the value of art (i.e., of the feelings it transmits) depends on men’s perception of the meaning of life, depends on what they consider to be the good and the evil of life. And what is good and what is evil is defined by what are termed religions” (54), and he draws a star next to it, also adding the annotations “morality” and “‘Religion’ = Wisdom about good & evil.” On pages 59–60, Wallace also finds the philosophical explanation of the nihilism that affects our time and to which his art seeks to respond. Here, he underlines “In reality these people believed in nothing, just as the Romans of the first century of our era believed in nothing” (59) and he writes “1980’s upper-class nihilism. Nietzschean invention in face of inability to worship – worship evil” on top of the page. Then, he also fully underlines the long passage “No longer able to believe in the Church religion, whose falsehood they had detected, and incapable of accepting true Christian teaching, which denounced their whole manner of life, these rich and powerful people, stranded without any religious conception of life, involuntarily returned to that pagan view of things which places life’s meaning in personal enjoyment. And then took place among the upper classes what is called the ‘Renaissance of science and art,’ and which was really not only a denial of every religion, but also an assertion that religion is unnecessary” (59–60), and he draws a third and final star next to it. Finally, he underlines the equally long passage “And so these people remained without any religious view of life. And, having none, they could have no standard wherewith to estimate what was good and what was bad art but that of personal enjoyment. And, having acknowledged their criterion of what was good to be pleasure, i.e., beauty, these people of the upper classes of European society went back in their comprehension of art to the gross conception of the primitive Greeks which Plato had already condemned. And conformably to this understanding of life, a theory of art was formulated” (p. 60), and next to this he annotates “Neat – Eerie applications. Today it’s not Church Christianity but Science as Meaning that’s been debunked – and we’ve nothing to replace it.”

9. Wallace underlines most of page 50 of his copy of WIA?, where the above-cited passages appear. Most notably, he underlines the passage “it is upon this capacity of man to receive another man’s expression of feeling and experience those feelings himself that the activity of art is based,” and next to it he writes two annotations, “Art as Empathy” and “Schopenhauer’s Basis of Morality.” Finally, on page 149 Wallace underlines “art, all art, has this characteristic, that it unites people,” and he circles “unites people” for emphasis.

10. Wallace’s conception of the reader’s empathy with the characters is a direct consequence of Tolstoy’s discourse. Here, though, there is a substantial difference between the two authors: Tolstoy was a nineteenth-century Realist who had unshaken faith in literature’s ability to represent the truth, Wallace was an end-of-the-twentieth-century avant-gardist who was too aware of postmodernism and deconstruction not to doubt literature’s ability to represent the truth. This is why he specifies that emotional intimacy with characters “is a delusion or a contrivance that’s set up through art by the writer” (Miller 62).

11. Wallace will always believe that this ability to merge artist and perceiver is the essence of true art. Non-coincidentally, in the essay “Borges on the Couch” (2004), he praises Borges because he “collapses reader and writer into a new kind of aesthetic agent” (293).

12. In his copy of WIA?, Wallace underlines “central to Tolstoy’s view are the notions of ‘infection’ and ‘sincerity’” (xiii), and he later annotates “Feeling must be real” (50). WIA? also clearly inspired Wallace to make his own the distinction between expressive and communicative writing. In a passage of the introduction, Wallace underlines that, for Tolstoy, “language is not merely the external manifestation (expression) of an internal psychical state, but the communication of it from one mind to another” (xiii).

13. This rejection was necessary especially considering Tolstoy’s zealotry, the highest exemplar of which is the following affirmation: “people who do not recognize Christianity in its true sense […] invent various sorts of philosophical and aesthetic theories for themselves which conceal from them the meaninglessness and depravity of their lives” (WIA? 125).

14. In his copy of WIA?, Wallace annotates where Tolstoy writes that a true work of art is composed in language that is “understood by all” (96). He circles the word “all” and writes “So trash” next to it. Wallace’s work is in direct opposition to this ideal, and hence his literature requires of its readers the following tasks, as Wallace told Donahue: “‘keeping track of enormous amounts of information’ […], ‘being required to pay attention to some of the strategies that regular entertainment uses’ and ‘having certain formulaic expectations that go along with reading commercial stuff fucked with. Not just disdained. Fucked with’” (Donahue 71–72).

15. In his copy of WIA?, Wallace underlines a passage of the introduction where Thomas writes that “while there is no denying that Tolstoy’s theory is one-sided and, in some respects, even fanatical, it is, when seen in broad outline, a coherent and plausible alternative to other equally one-sided and fanatical views, which are fashionable today, and for which it may suggest needed qualifications and corrections” (vii). In this sense, we may say that Wallace’s “appropriation with rectifications” of WIA? attempts to answer Thomas’s call and to establish a discourse that avoids the faults of both opposite fanatical views, Tolstoy’s and today’s nihilism’s.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Ca’ Foscari University of Venice [PhD grant]; DAAD [short term research grant 2019]; and the JFK Institute of FU Berlin [research grant].

Notes on contributors

Paolo Pitari

Paolo Pitari is a PhD student in American Studies at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice and Ludwig Maximilians Universität München. His research focuses on David Foster Wallace and the problem of free will.