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Fairbairn, Isaac

University of British Columbia

David Foster Wallace’s fiction is haunted by the spectral threats of solipsism and narcissism, evidence of a career-long preoccupation with the isolation and suffering of the modern subject. In the large body of scholarship amassed by Wallace's work a critical axiom has emerged that his artistic project is ultimately redemptive, committed to upholding the values of compassion, authenticity, and empathy in the face of a prevalent alienation, extensively and disturbingly depicted, resulting from the ironic distance, paralyzing self-consciousness, and crushing boredom endemic to contemporary U.S. society. Adam Kelly, despite authoring the hugely influential paper responsible for Wallace’s association with New Sincerity, intriguingly concludes his 2016 review of Wallace criticism by suggesting its overwhelming stress on the "affirmative quality” of Wallace’s work risks failing to “capture the darker side of Wallace's dialectic, the bleaker aspects of his vision," which may, "in the end, be the most productive to consider” ("Critical" 59). Taking up Kelly’s charge, my thesis will explore Wallace's short story cycle Brief Interviews with Hideous Men and argue for its investment in a different, less straightforwardly affirmative conceptual framework: the philosophy of immanence. To rehabilitate the redemptive conception of immanent experience typically ascribed to Wallace's fiction, I turn to some key pieces of his non-fiction to suggest that Wallace conceives of immanence as a deeply uncomfortable affective state in which the structured modes of understanding that typically organize reality are violently stripped away. Finally, I argue that Brief Interviews is not just invested in the darkness and terror of immanent social life but is itself darkly terrifying: its interrogative and antagonistic relationship with the reader repeatedly functions to disturb, communicating the uncomfortable uncertainty of immanent experience as a lived emotional reality.

Text

2022-10-20

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/82946

English

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/