Desperately Seeking David: Authorship in the Early Works of David Foster Wallace Authorship in the Early Works of David Foster Wallace

Abstract

The power of David Foster Wallace’s narrative persona has only increased since his death in 2008; however, his early fiction presents alternate perspectives on authorial presence beyond the commonly accepted discourse on Wallace. A closer look at the authorial poses in The Broom of the System and Girl with Curious Hair challenges the tidiness of a narrative that privileges sincerity at the expense of a discussion of such a notion’s assumptions and blind spots. In contrast to this narrative, Wallace pursues modes of authorship based in concealment throughout Broom and Girl, hiding his presence via a variety of boundaries, masks, queer personas, crosswriting, and imitative voices, to wildly varying degrees of success. In place of an intimate sense of presence, readers of these works receive a very different conception of authorship that crafts a series of imperial personas that adopt totalizing and phallocentric authorial positions that linger throughout Wallace’s body of work. However, several stories in Girl not commonly discussed in Wallace scholarship experiment with another, more present and intimate mode of authorship that rejects gimmicky authorial masks and dead authors and instead develops an author figure whose persona is convex, reaching outward toward the reader in hope of colliding with them rather than absorbing them.