Abstract
Although recent criticism has argued for the emergence of the “new atheist novel” over the claims of religion, Stephen J. Burn writes that “much post-postmodern fiction seems to yearn for at least a partial return to religion and spirituality” and that “a distillation of this impulse is also palpable in the heightened resonance the word soul carries in much post-postmodern fiction.” This chapter proposes to illustrate this “return of the soul” in turn-of-the-century fiction by focusing on David Foster Wallace’s “metaphysical ache,” his several attempts to convert to Catholicism, his revisitation of Hamlet’s ghost in the burlesque creation of a filmmaker wreath in Infinite Jest and his “underworld” dialogue with James Joyce in one of his short stories entitled “The Soul Is Not a Smithy.”
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Notes
- 1.
“That instead of a satanic way of transcending it, there’s an angelic way of transcending it”; “But if a piece of fiction can allow us imaginatively to identify with characters’ pain, we might then also more easily conceive of others identifying with our own. This is nourishing, redemptive.” “Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it’d find a way both to depict this dark world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it.” “What’s engaging and artistically real is how is it that we as human beings still have the capacity for joy, charity, genuine connections, for stuff that doesn’t have a price?” Conversations with David Foster Wallace, ed. Stephen Burn (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2013), XV, 22, 26, 27, 33.
- 2.
The blindness, imprisonment and master/slave imagery recall Andrew Marvell’s identical vision of the soul entrapped within the body in the opening stanza of the poem “A Dialogue Between the Soul and the Body” (I underline).Verse
Verse “SOUL O who shall, from this dungeon, raise A soul enslav’d so many ways? With bolts of bones, that fetter’d stands In feet, and manacled in hands; Here blinded with an eye, and there Deaf with the drumming of an ear; A soul hung up, as ‘twere, in chains Of nerves, and arteries, and veins; Tortur’d, besides each other part, In a vain head, and double heart.”
Stephen Burn makes reference to this poem but in relation to The Unnamed by Joshua Ferris in “Mapping the Syndrome Novel,” 46.
- 3.
In the second stanza of Marvell’s poem, it is the suffering body that tries to liberate itself from the tyrannical soul.
BODY
O who shall me deliver whole
From bonds of this tyrannic soul?
- 4.
Levinas’ sanctity should be distinguished from Schopenhauer’s foregrounding of ascetism that also serves as a reference to analyse Wallace’s mysticism in The Pale King. The character of levitating Shane Drinion who finds bliss in boredom is compared by Andrew Bennett to “Schopenhauer’s ascetic saint.” “Inside David Foster Wallace’s Head: Attention, Loneliness, Suicide, and the Other Side of Boredom,” in Bolger and Korb, Gesturing, 83. In this case, ascetism, holiness and self-renunciation are a denial of the “Will-to-Live.” See Schopenhauer, “On the Doctrine of the Denial of the Will-to-Live” in The World as Will and Representation (New York: Dover, 1958), 603–634.
- 5.
William Edelglass. “Levinas on suffering and compassion.” Sophia 45 (2006): 43–59.
- 6.
To mention a few: Angels (1983) by Denis Johnson, Angels in America (1991) by Tony Kushner, Ring of Brightest Angels around Heaven (1995) by Rick Moody. Harold Bloom. Fallen Angels. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007.
- 7.
Postmodernist Fiction. New York: Routledge, 1987. Constructing Postmodernism. New York: Routledge, 1992. The Cambridge Introduction to Postmodernism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. The Cambridge History of Postmodern Literature (with Len Platt). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016.
- 8.
For an extensive list of all interpretations regarding the ghost, see Jamie Redgate, Wallace and I, chapter 2 “He’s a ghost haunting his own body: Cartesian dualism in David Foster Wallace’s Ghost Stories,” 51–87 and specifically note 9, 85.
- 9.
On the soul and the chariot allegory, see in particular Phaedrus (245c-254e), translated by B. Jowett, Boston: Actonian Press, 2010. “All soul is immortal, for she is the source of all motion both in herself and in others. Her form may be described in a figure as a composite nature made up of a charioteer and a pair of winged steeds. The steeds of the gods are immortal, but ours are one mortal and the other immortal. The immortal soul soars upwards into the heavens, but the mortal drops her plumes and settles upon the earth.” […] “I told you about the charioteer and his two steeds, the one a noble animal who is guided by word and admonition only, the other an ill-looking villain who will hardly yield to blow or spur. Together all three, who are a figure of the soul, approach the vision of love. And now a fierce conflict begins.”
- 10.
Steve Paulson in his conversation with Wallace on the short story reads it as “a child’s fear of the adult world” while Wallace rather sees it as an “inverted Kafka” piece with “a narrator partly narrating as a child and partly as an adult” on “soul-level boredom.” In Conversations with David Foster Wallace, 127–128. Following Wallace’s interpretation, Marshall Boswell interprets the story as “a beautifully stylized depiction of bourgeois boredom that is itself deadly dull,” but also, like other stories in the collection, as an exploration of solipsism and beyond: “Oblivion looks beyond mere solipsism to explore the multiple ways in which his characters are not only alone inside their heads but also controlled to the point of madness, by the layered, nested, entropic workings of their interiors.” “The Constant Monologue Inside Your Head: Oblivion and the Nightmare of Consciousness,” in A Companion to David Foster Wallace Studies, 165, 151. David Hering reads the story as “a literal disembodiment, an escape from the body itself as a liberation from suffering” and “a move from ‘earthly phenomenality’ to an unbound, disembodied consciousness.” In Cambridge Companion to David Foster Wallace, ed. Ralph Clare (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2018), 100, 107.
- 11.
Greg Carlisle envisions the story as a genuine contradiction of Joyce’s metaphor: “Wallace’s title suggests that a smithy is not an accurate metaphor of the soul, given that we cannot control–and sometimes are not even consciously aware of–the way our experiences shape our personalities.” Nature’s Nightmare. Analyzing David Foster Wallace’s Oblivion (Los Angeles: Sideshow Media Group Press, 2013), 33.
- 12.
See Daniel Bristow. Joyce and Lacan: Reading, writing and Psychoanalysis. New York: Routledge, 2017.
Colette Soler asserts that Joyce became “the father of his own name. It is a button tie that is not a metaphor, but it is a button tie all the same that short-circuits the Oedipus complex and that nevertheless supplements it.”
Lacan Reading Joyce, transl. Devra Simiu (New York: Routledge, 2018), 209.
- 13.
“The Portrait, the portrait that he completed at the time, the one I evoked in connection with the uncreated conscience of his race, in connection with which he invokes the artificer par excellence which his father is supposed to be; while it is he who is the artificer. That it is he who knows, who knows what he has to do. Who believes that there is an uncreated conscience of some race or other. Which is where there lies a great illusion. That he also believes that there is a book of himself. What an idea to make oneself be a book!” Lacan, Sinthome, 56.
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Pire, B. (2024). Forging in the Smithy of David Foster Wallace’s Postmodern Soul. In: Louis-Dimitrov, D., Murail, E. (eds) The Persistence of the Soul in Literature, Art and Politics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40934-9_6
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