The Birth of the Reader: Inside the Final Edits to Infinite Jest

Abstract

ABSTRACTDavid Foster Wallace had a notoriously vexed relationship with copyeditors, which led D. T. Max to draw a natural conclusion: the exhausting round of corrections to the page proofs of Infinite Jest must have been due to bad copyediting. Much evidence, however, suggests that these final edits were a more complex affair than this version can account for. I argue that the copyediting in fact played a key role in the evolution of the book, by giving Wallace a chance to consider the line-by-line effects he wanted the novel to have on the reader – ideas he would then apply in his extensive round of proof corrections. Finalizing those corrections was in fact the work of a fairly harmonious team that Wallace would continue to work with over the next few years. His revisions even give insight into the important narrative theory question of how he envisioned the author-reader relationship, because they were made at a time when he would have been most clearly focused on shaping the reader’s responses. The patterns of his edits thus allow preliminary reflections on how he saw himself interacting with the reader through his words, and on his expectations about the reader’s work that are baked right into the text.