Spatial Modeling in David Foster Wallace's Short Stories

List of Figures

Figure 1: Medvedev, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Big_Sierpinski_triangle.svg

Figure 2: “CTA Brown Line” in the Loop area of Chicago

Figure 3: Embedded settings in “Here and There,” Girl with Curious Hair, 1989

Figure 4: A loop arising between the character’s origin and destination in “Here and There,” Girl with Curious Hair, 1989

Figure 5: Smyrna, Central Aroostook, ME, U. S. A. 2018. Scale undetermined; Maja Wojdyło, using “Google Maps.” google/maps/hKs7J8RnBdv. Accessed 07.03.2018

Figure 6: Scanned image of a headline included in “Little Expressionless Animals” (8)

Figure 7: Scanned image of a newspaper clipping included in “Little Expressionless Animals” (12)

Figure 8: Scanned image of a newspaper clipping and headline included in “Little Expressionless Animals” (29)

Figure 9: Scanned image of the first drawing included in “Little Expressionless Animals” (3)

Figure 10: Scanned image of the second drawing included in “Little Expressionless Animals” (5)

Figure 11: Scanned image of the third drawing included in “Little Expressionless Animals” (8)

Figure 12: Scanned image of the fourth drawing included in “Little Expressionless Animals” (14)

Figure 13: Scanned image of the fifth drawing included in “Little Expressionless Animals” (26)

Figure 14: Scanned image of the sixth drawing included in “Little Expressionless Animals” (29)

Figure 15: Scanned image of the last drawing included in “Little Expressionless Animals” (39)

Introduction

David Foster Wallace described his own fiction in the following words: “I’m talking about what it means to be alive. And how formal and structural stuff in avant-garde things I think can vibrate, can represent on a page, what it feels like to be alive right now” (Wallace qtd. in Lipsky 40, emphasis original). The following chapters trace and analyze the applications of spatial narrative techniques deployed by Wallace in his short fiction, so as “to convey the distinct experience of living in the USA at the turn of the twenty-first century” (Wallace qtd. in Lipsky 40). A close reading of the three short story collections published by Wallace, Girl with Curious Hair (1989), Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (1999) and Oblivion: Stories (2004), conducted from a perspective combining narratological and semiotic approaches, reveals that the works are abundant in multiple extraordinarily intricate formal designs, paradoxical, level-crossing multimodal loops, being a particularly noteworthy example. The following chapters demonstrate that Strange Loops (sensu Hofstadter) and tangled hierarchies of narrative levels underpin several of Wallace’s stories structurally and thematically. Together with the author’s tendency to use spatial metaphors for encoding postmodern urban pathologies, tearing at the social fabric, and presenting the storyworlds as uncanny and hostile, the looped structures participate in creating the image of a trap-world that can only be escaped if the characters are granted active engagement on behalf of the reader.

One reason for choosing artistic space and spatial form as the main point of interest for this analysis is that it can be considered “the semantic core of a work of literature and the basis for other meaning-generating systems it’s comprised of” (Sławiński 2, own translation). Plot, characters, narrative situation, themes, and ideology are therefore considered here chiefly in terms of their relations to the geometric, virtual, and genidentic spatiality (sensu Kestner). Our focus is, in other words, on the secondary spatial illusion instigated by certain textual signals that can be traced in selected short stories viewed as elements of bigger wholes. For “[s]hort stories often do not come to the reader alone. They exist in the context of other texts” and “this situation adds an extra dimension of meaning to the individual short story. It relates to the texts that surround it” (Malcolm 42). Another reason for making space the main lens, through which to read David Foster Wallace’s short stories, is that the setting tends to play a prominent part in reflecting authors’ “comprehensive experience of existence” and therefore seems a particularly valuable source of insight into their oeuvre (Chwin 232, own translation). Finally, although, as Laurie McRae Andrew points out in The Geographies of David Foster Wallace (2023), there is a “developing critical understanding of Wallace as a deeply and fundamentally spatial writer,” his short fiction and its literariness remain less explored than his novels and their broader implications (2).

As the text uses a range of similar terms, like narrative level and narrative plane, for instance, some preliminary distinctions appear necessary to be made at this point. Moving away from Gérard Genette’s original classification of narrative levels, I employ Mieke Bal and Monika Fludernik’s terminology to distinguish and describe embedded settings. In this distinction, the diegetic level is where the first, primary story unfolds. The extradiegetic level is superior to the level of diegesis, it is where the primary narrative is narrated. The hypodiegetic level, in turn, is projected at the bottom of the hierarchy of narrative levels whenever a story appears within the primary story. As demonstrated in the following chapters (e.g., sections discussing “Here and There,” “Good Old Neon,” and “The Soul Is Not a Smithy”), Wallace’s stories often involve vertiginous extensions of the hierarchy of narrative levels. Depending on how many embedded narratives a given text includes, it may involve various degrees of hypodiegesis. In “Here and There,” for instance, the structure extends as far as the hypo-hypo-hypodiegetic level. Whenever I use the prefix meta-, it refers to self-reflexive remarks included in the narrative that refer to the text they are included in, thus again following Bal’s understanding of metadiegesis as the uppermost level in the hierarchy.

Another framework used in the following analysis is Boris Uspensky’s classification of narrative planes, originally used in his discussion of focalization. Within Uspensky’s set of compositional planes, the “ideological plane” denotes the most elusive area, “least accessible to formalization,” where “the point of view … the author assume[s] when he evaluates and perceives ideologically the world which he describes” manifests itself (Uspensky 8). The “phraseological plane,” in turn, refers to the verbal presentation of particular elements of a given narrative that may reveal further details about the point of view involved (Uspensky 17).

For example, within the same work the author may first describe one character from the point of view of another character, then he may use his own point of view (that is, he may speak in his own voice), then he may resort to the point of view of a third person who is neither the author nor an immediate participant in the action, and so forth. In many cases the plane of phraseology (or the plane of speech characteristics) may be the only plane in the work on which we can detect changes in the authorial position. (Uspensky 17)

The “spatial and temporal plane,” in turn, is where a “spatial or temporal perspective adopted in the construction of the narrative” emerges (Uspensky 57). Finally, the “plane of psychology” is where various subjective points of view included in the narrative appear, if there are any (Uspensky 81).

The most vital theoretical framework used in the following readings of Wallace’s short fiction, however, was proposed by Janusz Sławiński in his 1978 “Space in Literature: Preliminary Distinctions and Introductory Remarks.” There, Sławiński notes that in literature

space constitutes itself through three simultaneous montage processes that might be considered manifestations of a single semantic process. Within this distinction, literary space consists of:

1. the plane of description
2. the plane of scenery
3. the plane of additional meanings (Sławiński 16, own translation)

The plane of description, as the name itself suggests, deals with the way space is contained in descriptive sentences. It is the basis and beginning of accumulating a given text’s spatial whole. While analyzing the plane of description, the focus is on the phraseological and syntactic rendering of sentences containing references to and descriptions of space. While defining the plane of scenery, Sławiński compares it to “putting up stage decorations for a theatrical performance, that are not important in themselves but become significant because of the action that occurs within” (Sławiński 18, own translation). On this plane, particular independent elements of the setting are assembled to form “systems of higher order … seemingly independent of the generating mechanism” (Sławiński 18–19, own translation). Finally, the plane of additional meanings is a new layer of meaning created in a way analogous to how descriptive sentences give rise to the level of scenery. These additional meanings do not stem directly from the semantic rendering of the descriptive sentences in themselves. Rather than that, they are constructed on and of the spatial rendering of a given text, creating an extra layer of connotations with more or less pronounced symbolic characteristics that are never directly stated, merely implied.

Even though Janusz Sławiński uses the Polish word płaszczyzna that literally translates into plane to refer to these three elements, perhaps it might also be useful to think about them in terms of levels comprising a hierarchical structure similar to the hierarchy of narrative levels used to refer to embedded narratives and the following chapters use thus revised terminology, referring to the level of description, the level of scenery and the level of additional meanings. According to Sławiński, “space can arise out of a verbal utterance only to the degree that it has been inscribed into the utterance in the form of sentences of a particular type … descriptive sentences” (Sławiński 16, own translation). He quickly explains that he does not mean that space can only be constructed by means of description. It means that some kind of description must be planted:

in the very beginning of the accretion process of a given spatial whole, where it functions as a kind of ‘ignition switch.’ Space cannot come into existence without this initial element of description. Then the spatial whole can be maintained and expanded using various descriptive and non-descriptive narrative techniques, but the systematizing role of description remains dominant in both phases of accumulation. (Sławiński 16, own translation)