Footnotes and David Foster Wallace - the Editing of Infinite Jest

In the post-production of Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace rejected his editor Michael Pietsch's qualms with the inclusion of endnotes. Pietsch preferred the easier to read footnotes. But Wallace said that endnotes let him "make the primary-text an easier read while at once 1) allowing a discursive, authorial intrusive style w/o Finneganizing the story, 2) mimic the information-flood and data-triage I expect'd be an even bigger part of US life 15 years hence. 3) have a lot more technical/medical verisimilitude 4) allow/make the reader go literally physically 'back and forth' in a way that perhaps cutely mimics some of the story's thematic concerns ... 5) feel emotionally like I'm satisfying your request for compression of text without sacrificing enormous amounts of stuff."

He later told Charlie Rose that, "There is a way, it seems to me, that reality is fractured right now. ... The difficulty about writing about that reality is that text is very linear, it's very unified. I am constantly on the lookout for ways to fracture the text that aren't totally disoriented. You can take the lines and jumble them up, and that's nicely fractured, but nobody's going to read it."

Whether Pietsch was convinced by this rationale or just thought Wallace had an unhealthy footnote fetish, he eventually acquiesced. But although published version contained almost 100 of pages of endnotes, Pietsch persuaded Wallace to cut hundreds more. When Marie Mundaca designed the interior of Consider the Lobster, she helped Wallace capture the type of fractured reality he had sought elsewhere to capture with footnotes and endnotes. To layout "Host," "Wallace's idea was to have leaders and labels, like a diagram," she said. "He wanted something that looked like hypertext rollovers that were immediate and at hand." Wallace took interest in the intricacies of book design and would call Mundaca for "very intense discussions regarding the semiotics of the leaders (the lines going from the text to the boxes) and the tics and the line width of the boxes and the ampersands."

Over his career, Wallace developed a respect for editors and their work that was somewhat lacking in his relationships with early editors. In winter of 2008, a couple months after Wallace hanged himself in the furnished garage where he did most of his writing, Karen Green, his wife, and Nadell, his agent, brought themselves to enter his workshop. They found a neat pile of the manuscript for a novel he had been working on for the past eight years. Nadell said, "Karen clearly felt that it was there for us to find."[31] In his last hours, Wallace entrusted his unfinished novel to someone else.

Works Cited

[1] Moore, Steven. "The First Draft Version of Infinite Jest." July 16, 2009. Thehowlingfantods.com.

[1] Wallace, David Foster. "Tense Present: Democracy, English, and the Wars over Usage." Harper's Magazine. April 2001.

[1] Neyfakh, Leon. "Gerry Howard on Discovering, Editing, and Hatching David Foster Wallace: 'He Was the First Person Who Ever Called Me "Mister."'" The New York Observer. September 17, 2008.

[1] Waters, Julia. "Ruth Reichl on David Foster Wallace and Magazines." Salon Magazine. October 6, 2009.

[1] Kipp, Jeremiah. "Looking for One Value but Nothing Comes my Way: An Interview with Film Critic Glenn Kenny about David Foster Wallace." The House Next Door. April 8, 2009.

[1] Neyfakh, Leon. "Infinite Jest Editor Michael Pietsch of Little, Brown on David Foster Wallace." The New York Observer. September 19, 2008. [

1] Pietsch, Michael. "Editing Infinite Jest." Infinite Summer. July 3, 2009.

[1] "David Foster Wallace on Life and Work." Wall Street Journal. September 19, 2008. (Adapted from a commencement speech given by David Foster Wallace to the 2005 graduating class at Kenyon College.)

[1] Wallace, David Foster. Consider the Lobster. Little, Brown and Company. 2006.

[1] Lipsky, David. "The Lost Years & Last Days of David Foster Wallace" Rolling Stone. October 20, 2008.

[1] Max, D.T. "The Unfinished." The New Yorker. March 9, 2009.

[1] "David Foster Wallace." Charlie Rose. March 27, 1997.

[1] Mundaca, Marie. "The Influence of Anxiety: Wading In." Hipster Bookclub. June 2009.

[1] Thompson, Bob. "New Yorker Publishes Part Of Unfinished Wallace Novel." The Washington Post. March 2, 2009.