David Foster Wallace and Religion: Essays on Faith and Fiction ed. by Michael McGowan and Martin Brick

Abstract

Reviewed by: David Foster Wallace and Religion: Essays on Faith and Fiction ed. by Michael McGowan and Martin Brick Michael F. Miller (bio) David Foster Wallace and Religion: Essays on Faith and Fiction Edited by Michael McGowan and Martin Brick Bloomsbury Academic Press, 2019. xiv + 206 pp. $99 hardback. To the extent that a particular author's body of work can alter a generation's literary-critical sensibilities and rewire the affective infrastructures with which it receives, processes, and transmits the culturally-dominant [End Page 234] structures of feeling, then surely a convincing case can be made on behalf of David Foster Wallace's enduring influence on the present. Published in 2019―12 years after Wallace's suicide––Michael McGowan and Martin Brick's collection David Foster Wallace and Religion: Essays on Faith and Fiction captures the ebb and flow of recent critical moods and provides a literary prehistory of sorts to contemporary cultural sensibilities. The core intuition of David Foster Wallace and Religion is that since Wallace's writing explicitly draws on a number of different religious traditions, teasing out these religious influences provides a richer critical account of Wallace's often-strained relation to secular society. There is an unspoken and slightly conservative lament here, in which post-war society's loss of religious belief is something to be mourned. Each contributor to the volume picks up on one of these threads in Wallace's writing and situates it within a broader religious and philosophical frame. For many readers, this approach will yield fresh perspectives and new insights into Wallace's work. Given the sheer range of topics and thinkers addressed in the volume, even the most studied scholar of Wallace will undoubtedly put the collection down having reevaluated his work. The philosophical breadth and scope provided by McGowan and Brick's contributors is one of the collection's main strengths. The chapters here draw on a dazzling array of religious and philosophical traditions, ranging from Christian fundamentalist twelve-step programs (Short); Anglo-American pragmatism (Bolger); Nietzschean nihilism (McGowan); Christian soteriology (Laird); Taoist trans-cultural universalism (Spaulding); Zen Buddhism (Piekarski); and Mormon propaganda, among others. To the editors' credit, they have chosen to work with a broad and inclusive definition of religion that considers equally Western and non-Western religious influences in Wallace's work. Spaulding and Piekarski's chapters on Taoism and Zen Buddhism respectively provide not so much rote Orientalist interpretations of Wallace's work as fresh connections between the literature and the previously-ignored undercurrents of non-Western religious thought in his corpus. Chapters such as these are welcome and exciting, as one might view them as pushing the interpretative boundary into new and unforeseen critical spaces. While there are a number of strong chapters included in the volume, the collection as a whole does occasionally suffer from the limitations imposed on it by its founding critical frame. This is to say that the additive or supplementary approach to criticism—Author X and Subject Y—is necessarily accompanied by its own set of interpretative limits, constraints, and blindspots. Here, these constraints emerge as an overreliance on the intentional fallacy—the appeals to Wallace's biography border on the hagiographic [End Page 235] and are equally unpersuasive to readers who are skeptical of or uninterested in the historical record's ability to provide a "window into Wallace's mind" (188)—and a tendency to evaluate Wallace's work within a literary-historical vacuum. At worst, the additive approach to criticism creates not so much new and interesting questions about an author and their work as it makes possible the conditions by which one might get bogged down in simple tautologies and definitional pedantries. For example, in "Zen Buddhist Philosophy Lurking in the Work of David Foster Wallace," Kryzystof Piekarski poses "his own hypothesis" which suggests that Wallace's popularity can be attributed to the fact that "he implicitly stumbled his way into a Buddhist way of thinking, and unbeknownst to his reading audience, a lived, experiential Buddhist philosophy is what they themselves were starved for in the realm of literature" (176). If one supposes that this "hypothesis" is the chapter's thesis, then the evidence for...