Pay Attention! David Foster Wallace and his Real Enemies

Abstract

In his 1993 interview with Larry McCaffery, David Foster Wallace famously proclaimed postmodern authors like John Barth, Thomas Pynchon and Vladimir Nabokov to be his real enemies, patriarchs for his patricide. This unambiguous statement of aesthetic intent laid down a clear set of guidelines for literary critics, and much of the subsequent critical reception of Wallace has followed the path set down by Wallace in the early 1990s. While there are obvious advantages to following Wallace's guidelines, an exclusive focus on his complex agon with his literary forebears runs the risk of obscuring some of the pronounced continuities between Wallace and his postmodern predecessors. One of these continuities is the crucial theme of paying attention. This theme is at the centre of much of Wallace's fiction, but it also plays a decisive part in novels written by the patriarchs for Wallace's patricide, and by tracing the theme through Wallace's work as well as through novels by Nabokov and Pynchon the article argues that Wallace's eloquent framing of his own work as a necessary showdown with postmodern irony needs to be supplemented with an increased awareness of the many literary affinities between Wallace and his real enemies.