If not exactly the dawn of ‘Wallace studies’—Marshall Boswell’s Understanding David Foster Wallace and Stephen Burn’s David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest: A Reader’s Guide, both published in 2003, take that cake—the Cohen-Konstantinou volume is maybe something like the first rays of actual sunlight. The essays in the collection are thoughtful and idiosyncratic and very possibly, as the book’s backside proclaims, “field defining” pieces of scholarship. But reading them, indisputably intelligent and perceptive as they are, it occurs to me that there is something deeply unsatisfying, even perverse, about the notion of ‘Wallace Studies,’ and this book in particular, which is part of University of Iowa’s “New American Canon” series. I am reminded that there is nothing that more thoroughly extinguishes what is vibrant and alive in an author's work like an academic anthology dedicated to identifying what is vibrant and alive in an author's work. I was trying to explain this to a friend, what it feels like to read criticism of Wallace, who is, and let’s just get this out of the way, my favorite writer, and he described being at an excellent party, one with that tenuous but unquestioned sense of self-contained purpose, when somebody suddenly shuts off the music and shouts, “Hey, are we having a great time or what?”
[2] I would be more eager to criticize this cutesy Wallace-mimesis if I wasn’t already so obviously guilty of the same thing. Exempli gratia these footnotes. Which I should also say means we’ve arrived at the essay’s first instance of another persistent, if often problematized, element of Wallace’s work: self-reference/reflexivity—that is, this footnote serves as an example of the tendency it describes. All of this contributes to my suspicion that there is something stickily contagious about Wallace’s style. It gets stuck in your ears, infecting you with his idiosyncrasies, so that a lot of writing on Wallace winds up sounding a lot like Wallace’s writing. As for footnotes, Ira B. Nadel’s assessment of Wallace’s prolific use of the device (from the aforementioned Legacy of… volume) suggests reading them as evidence of his “nonlinear thinking” and his “active intellectual and creative energy” as well as the “double-consciousness of the text.” I’m not entirely convinced by any of those characterizations, and don’t expect you to be anything but annoyed by my little sub-textual interjections. Perhaps anticipating your vexation, however, I’ve gone ahead and put some of the most thrilling bits of the essay into the notes, so you know, read them, please.