I'm looking at David Foster Wallace and "The Long Thing": New Essays on the Novels (ed. by Marshall Boswell). After reading Infinite Jest, I find myself pulled in by the world of Wallace studies. The idea of community and communication (and the breakdown and enablers of the same) in Wallace seem to relate to phatic studies. Here are a couple of quotes from Boswell's book that convey ideas of two different kinds of community:
(1):
In the first conceptualization of community... individuals are: pre-existing subjectivities. These subjectivities have bound themselves together with other subjectivities for the common good. Their mode of communication with one another can be called "intersubjectivity". Literature within such a community is the imitation, or reflection, or representation of community.and (2):
[In] the second conceptualization of community... [i]n place of individuals with self-enclosed subjectivities, Nancy puts singularities that are aboriginally partagés, shared, sheared, open to an abyssal outside. Singularities are extroverted, exposed to other singularities at the limit point where everything vanishes. Language in such a community becomes literature, writing, not sacred myth. Literature is the expression of the unworking of community.
The citations are to Hillis Miller's On Literature and Jean-Luc Nancy's La communauté désoeuvrée. The question of writing vs myth reminds me of the discussion (a couple blog posts ago) of Eliade, and inventors vs hunters.
Just one concrete example from Wallace's text (as read by Boswell) may do to illustrate the way these ideas are being used:
Ugly as it is, The Storrow 500 [pictured above -JC] has become available to the novel's lyric register, which so often acts as a transition between scenes.With the thought that people are not directly able to communicate with each other by default, introducing and developing specific symbols along the boundary (between and across characters, scenes, reader, writer, registers of constative, performative, descriptive, or literary). If people are by default stuck in something like a "private language" (but see earlier post on distributed cognition for some doubts about that), introducing these kinds of cross-over terms, images, and reference points becomes necessary for communication to take place.
Quotes above are from the chapter: Modelling Community and Narrative in Infinite Jest and The Pale King by Andrew Warren, which looks like a slight reworking of: Warren, Andrew. 2012. Narrative Modeling and Community Organizing in The Pale King and Infinite Jest. Studies in the Novel 44, no. 4: 389–408.
another quick thought here, about phatic communication in literature. Inner quote is from Conversations with David Foster Wallace.
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