Abstract
David Foster Wallace, celebrated novelist and reader of neuroscientific literature, changed his definition of the encyclopedic novel at mid-career, based on his understanding of the cognitive concept of “exformation,” which suggests that human communication depends on the exclusion and discarding of massive amounts of information. Examining the relationship of varied examples of encyclopedic fiction to emotion, as well as conscious and unconscious perception, this chapter interprets issues of the types and scales of mental stimulus in Infinite Jest and The Pale King. The chapter concludes that in the unfinished Pale King Wallace builds a new form of novelistic encyclopedism that attempts to register the huge amount of psychic data available in a single second’s perception.
You’re special—it’s O.K.—but so’s the guy across the table who’s raising two kids sober and rebuilding a ’73 Mustang. It’s a magical thing with 4,000,000,000 forms. It kind of takes your breath away.
—David Foster Wallace in a letter to a friend, 1999 (Max, 285)
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Works Cited
Author’s Final Book a Tale of Boredom. National Public Radio. Apr. 2, 2011, http://www.npr.org/2011/04/02/135022736/authors-final-book-an-unfinished-tale-of-boredom.
Boswell, Marshall. ‘The Constant Monologue Inside Your Head’: Oblivion and the Nightmare of Consciousness. In Boswell and Burn, 151–170.
———, ed. David Foster Wallace and “The Long Thing”: New Essays on the Novels. New York: Bloomsbury, 2014.
Boswell, Marshall, and Stephen J. Burn, eds. A Companion to David Foster Wallace Studies. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.
Burn, Stephen J. “A Paradigm of the Life of Consciousness: The Pale King.” In Boswell, ed., David Foster Wallace, 149–168.
———, ed. Conversations with David Foster Wallace. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012.
———. David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest: A Reader’s Guide. 2nd ed. New York: Continuum, 2012.
Cioffi, Frank Louis. “‘An Anguish Become Thing’: Narrative as Performance in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest.” Narrative 8, no. 2 (2000): 161–181.
de Bourcier, Simon. “Forms, Punchcards, and LETTERS: Self-Reference, Recursion, and (Un)self-Consciousness in The Pale King’s Representation of Bureaucracy.” English Studies 95, no. 1 (2014): 40–58.
DeLillo, Don. White Noise. 1985. New York: Penguin, 2009.
Ercolino, Stefano. The Maximalist Novel: From Thomas Pynchon’s “Gravity’s Rainbow” to Roberto Bolaño’s “2666.” New York: Bloomsbury, 2014.
Hering, David. David Foster Wallace: Fiction and Form. New York: Bloomsbury, 2016.
Karmodi, Ostap. “June 13th, 2011 [Interview with David Foster Wallace].” Blog Entry. Livejournal.com. N. p., 13 June 2011. http://ostap.livejournal.com/799511.html.
LeClair, Tom. “The Prodigious Fiction of Richard Powers, William Vollmann, and David Foster Wallace.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 38, no. 1 (1996): 12–37.
Letzler, David. “Encyclopedic Novels and the Cruft of Fiction: Infinite Jest’s Endnotes.” In Boswell, ed., David Foster Wallace, 127–148.
Max, D. T. Every Love Story is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace. New York: Penguin, 2012.
Mendelson, Edward. “Encyclopedic Narrative: From Dante to Pynchon.” MLN 91, no. 6 (December 1976): 1267–1275.
Miller, Laura, Michael Pietsch, Rick Moody, and Sandro Veronesi. “Everything and More: The Pale King by David Foster Wallace.” Panel discussion at the PEN World Voices Festival, 268 Mulberry Street, New York, April 26, 2011. http://www.pen.org/video/everything-and-more-pale-king-david-foster-wallace/.
Natalini, Roberto. “David Foster Wallace and the Mathematics of Infinity.” In Boswell and Burn, 43–58.
Nørretranders, Tor. The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to Size. Translated by Jonathan Sydenham. New York: Viking, 1998.
Wallace, David Foster. Both Flesh and Not: Essays. New York: Little, Brown, 2012.
———. Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. Boston: Little, Brown, 1999.
———. David Foster Wallace Papers. Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas-Austin.
———. Girl with Curious Hair. New York: W. W. Norton, 1989.
———. Infinite Jest. 10th Anniversary ed. New York: Back Bay, 2006.
———. “Laughing with Kafka.” Harper’s (July 1998): 23, 26–27.
———. Oblivion. New York: Little, Brown, 2004.
———. The Pale King: An Unfinished Novel. 2011. New York: Back Bay, 2012.
———. A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments. New York: Little, Brown, 1997.
———. This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion about Living a Compassionate Life. Boston: Little, Brown, 2009.
Wilson, Timothy D. Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004.
Wood, James. The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004.
Wouters, Conley. “‘What Am I, a Machine?’: Humans, Information, and Matters of Record in David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King.” In Boswell, ed., David Foster Wallace, 169–186.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2017 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Severs, J. (2017). Cutting Consciousness Down to Size: David Foster Wallace, Exformation, and the Scale of Encyclopedic Fiction. In: Tavel Clarke, M., Wittenberg, D. (eds) Scale in Literature and Culture. Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64242-0_11
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64242-0_11
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-64241-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-64242-0
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)