“Author Here”: David Foster Wallace and the Post-metafictional Paradox

Abstract

Metafiction remained an integral component of David Foster Wallace's writing throughout his career. And although his early novella “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way” suggests that the metafictional games of postmodernism had become an end in themselves, “Octet,” the central story in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, provides a key to understanding what Wallace's later use of metafiction says about honesty, authority, and narcissism in the “post-postmodern.”

Keywords::

• David Foster Wallace
• postmodernism
• metafiction
• sincerity
• “Octet”

Notes

Notes

¹ “Author Here” (The Pale King 256).

² “We must be careful, however, not to overstate Wallace's presumed rejection of Barth's work in particular and postmodern fiction in general. Indeed, Wallace continued to employ metafictional tactics right up to the end of his career, appearing as himself in his final work The Pale King” (Harris 103–04)—though suggesting that the two characters named “Dave Wallace” in The Pale King are Wallace “appearing as himself,” as opposed to another metafictional layer, is itself an overstatement. Neither character bearing the proper noun Dave Wallace resembles the writer David Foster Wallace, as they are both accountants, even as one of them claims to be authoring a section of The Pale King itself.

³ The narrator continues by way of explanation: “[…] this self-conscious explicitness and deconstructed disclosure supposedly making said metafiction ‘realer’ than a piece of pre-modern “Realism” that depends on certain antiquated techniques to create an ‘illusion’ of a windowed access to a ‘reality’ isomorphic with ours but possessed of and yielding up higher truths […]” (Curious 265). Whether this didacticism was necessary for a reader after “Lost in the Funhouse,” John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman, and other postmodern metafictions saying basically the same thing is an open question.

⁴ Pinpointing the origin of self-referential narration would probably be as impossible as pinpointing the origin of narration itself, but as an early example I am here specifically thinking of the Roman de la Rose, an epic poem composed by Guillaume de Lorris and Jeun de Meun between c. 1225 and c. 1290, in which both authors appear as characters narrating the story within the story itself. It may be of some interest—and does contradict my claim that referencing line numbers is a product of the 1960s—that the Rose, too, while not giving an exact line number, does metafictionally reference and quote earlier lines within itself.

⁵ One might assume that “noncynicism” denotes a particularly active form of choosing not to be cynical, though the formal logic in Konstantinou's formulation is strained, and how “nonnaïve noncynicism” differs from a kind of plain old informed and self-aware belief is not explained.

⁶ My purpose is not to disparage this reading of “Octet” in relation to Interviews. The story does appear in the exact center of the book, and much of Interviews does seem to be working as a cycle aimed at an “interrogation” of the reader—though relying on the location of “Octet” is misguided, since Michael Pietsch determined the final order of stories in the book.

⁷ What the term “postmetafictional” is meant to denote is not explained, though one can assume Boswell means a metafictional comment on metafiction as a literary device.

⁸ As an aside, “Octet” is the only example I am aware of where a “Q:” is followed by an actual question in Wallace's work.

⁹ I quote this passage at length to include the mention of time, and the limited amount thereof for both writer and reader, which recurs throughout “Octet.” Of particular concern to the narrator—“you,” the writer—more so even than the time it is taking to write the story, is the limited amount of leisure time available to your anticipated reader, most of which is assumed to be spent in using literature as a form of escape—part of the reason why the metafictional interruption will presumably be so unwelcome.

¹⁰ Boswell does avoid this trap, noting that the “author,” having “been turned into an ‘object’ of the story, that is, a character, is still a mere device, the self-consciousness is designed paradoxically to seem real” (186), though this still—like Max and others—fails to account for the “author” being a second-person pronoun, and so one of the ways in which “Octet” punctures the fourth wall is by making “you” the author.

¹¹ Teaching “Octet” the first week of an undergraduate seminar on metafiction, my students made the same mistake: they took the narrator's assertions at face value. They thus assumed that the first four Pop Quizzes were actually failed attempts at a story David Foster Wallace himself was writing, and then wondered why they were included in Interviews if Wallace didn't think they worked. In other words, they read “Octet” as a series of failed attempts, rather than reading it as a comment on both “attempt” and “failure” themselves. Contrary to Konstantinou's claim, for my students this identification led to further alienation from, rather than a connection to, Wallace the actual writer, as again they felt that if Wallace didn't like the stories he should have left them out of Interviews. If this does support Konstantinou's reading, as believing in the “100% candor of the author,” then the effect is alienation rather than identification.

¹² A neat reference to commercialism, as well as calling to mind the end of “Westward,” where “absolutely no salesman will call” (Curious 373).

¹³ I don't want to push too hard on this hypothetical scenario, but the situational differences between chef and writer are still profound. The chef could send someone over with more salad dressing or a less well-done steak, or whatever, if something were wrong, while in the case of fiction there really is little that can be done if something isn't “working.” For example, see the questionnaire at the center of Donald Barthelme's Snow White (88–89). Assuming, of course, that we are talking about ink-on-paper, printed fiction and not extending our discussion to forms of electronic literature—discussion of which in this case would be a complete nightmare.

¹⁴ As the narrator notes, “yes: things have come to such a pass that even belletristic fiction writers consider themselves to have ‘careers”’ (Interviews 145).

¹⁵ See Kelly (132–40) for an excellent discussion of the evolution of the difference between “authenticity” and “sincerity.”

¹⁶ For Marx, the formula is they do not know it, but they are doing it. Slavoj Žižek's Freudian twist on Marx is they know very well what they are doing, but still, they are doing it. The latter is, of course, the postmodernist logic, the recognition of the ideological mask and yet the (unconscious) insistence on maintaining the mask. “Cynical reason is no longer naïve, but is a paradox of an enlightened false consciousness: one knows the falsehood very well, one is well aware of a particular interest hidden behind an ideological universality, but still one does not renounce it” (Sublime Object 31).

¹⁷ I would be more inclined to agree with Harris if he were applying this same conclusion to “Octet,” but he is here quoting “Octet” while referring only to “Westward.” And in these terms Harris unintentionally contradicts his argument, claiming “the way out of the labyrinth's solipsistic confinement, is the presence of another human consciousness, in this case, that of the author's” (Harris 117, emphasis added). The opposite of directing metafiction outward toward the reader, “Westward” further reinforces metafiction as author-centric. The reader, in that she is involved at all, is there only to be reminded “that what she's experiencing as she reads is mediated through a human consciousness” (McCaffery, qtd. in Harris 117).

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Notes on contributors

Thomas Winningham

Thomas Winningham holds a PhD in English from the University of Southern California.