Staiger, Jeff

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    “Turning a Man’s Life Right Around”: Wallace’s Rehabilitation of Frederick Exley in IJ
    (The Journal of David Foster Wallace Studies, 2020) Staiger, Jeff
    This article demonstrates the ways in which Wallace draws upon Frederick Exley's autobiographical novel, A Fan's Notes, to create the character Don Gately, ultimately the hero of Wallace's magnum opus, Infinite Jest. In particular, it traces how Wallace fashions Gately to serve in the role of humane Everyman a la Joyce's Leopold Bloom, with the crucial complication that, just as Joyce based Bloom on an actual novelist, Italo Svevo, so Wallace, meticulously imitating Joyce's creative process, based Gately on Exley, recycling myriad details from Exley's now largely forgotten novel in order to establish its relevance to his own work. The special aptness of A Fan's Notes for Infinite Jest is that Exley's novel treats the same themes that are central to Wallace's novel -- addiction, sports, spectatorship, manhood, heroism -- but presents them with an individualistic, macho, cynical swagger that is precisely the attitude that Wallace identifies as a pervasive postmodern pathology that needs to be corrected. In rewriting Exley, Wallace performs a kind of textual therapy on his predecessor that reverses point for point the unregenerate cynicism flaunted by Exley, thereby proffering in the portrayal of Gately a more open and sincere, and more viable, approach to the rehabilitation of the self. On another, metafictional level, Wallace’s revision of revision as rehabilitation both affirms and revises the preeminent postmodern theory of literary revisionism, Harold Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence.
  • ItemOpen Access
  • ItemOpen Access
    James Wood's Case Against 'Hysterical Realism' and Thomas Pynchon
    (Antioch review, 2008) Staiger, Jeff