The book—born of a 2009 MLA roundtable of the same name and edited by Samuel Cohen and Lee Konstantinou—is slickly published, emblazoned with a smiley face whose eyes are an infinity symbol (∞), and contains a mixture of “critical and creative” assessments of Wallace’s oeuvre. The ‘critical’ pieces are divided into the subsections History, Aesthetics, and Community, and range from Josh Roiland’s Nietzschean reading of Wallace’s journalism to Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s account of 2009’s ‘Infinite Summer,’ a net-phenomenon that saw thousands of readers forming online communities to read and discuss Wallace’s undisputed opus Infinite Jest in the aftermath of his death. The bulk of the ‘creative’ contributions are laudatory commentaries from Wallace’s writer-friends and contemporaries (Franzen, Eggers, Moody, DeLillo, Saunders), all of them occasioned by his passing, some of them betraying, in their universally emphatic veneration, subtle traces of something like envy/resentment. The editors Cohen-and-Konstantinou, both of whom also have essays in the collection, open the volume with a hyper-chatty preface, replete with self-conscious acknowledgements of the complexities of the editorial endeavor, a brief intellectual history of the ‘intentional fallacy,’ and endnotes that say things like: “we warned you, this stuff gets pretty complicated pretty quickly, which is why we’re just going to avoid the whole subject from here on out.”[2]
[1] It turns out this anxiety was well-founded, as the basic premise of my essay—that Westward is Wallace’s most explicit effort to exhaust the devices of postmodern metafiction and champion something more honest, more humble, and more human in its place—is effectively a consensus opinion in academic circles at this point. Which goes to show it’s really useless to be right if someone else was right before you. Like it might even be better to be horribly but unprecedentedly wrong. Anyway, the bit of the essay that rehearses that apparently rote argument—I thought rather eloquently—has been radically and painfully shortened.