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Varieties also appears in Infinite Jest (IJ), this time paired with James’ Principles of Psychology (Henry Holt, 1890): a hollowed-out, large print version of these books serves as a cocaine stash. There are some very pointed and obvious allusions to religious thought in Wallace’s fiction: “Federer: Both Flesh and Not,” (originally published as “Watching Roger Federer as Religious Experience”) seems to try to draw the reader’s attention to William James’ Varieties of Religious Experience. Anyone interested in questions about interpretive strategies and what might count as evidence for a particular interpretation of a written work (fictional or nonfictional) will appreciate this collection. These are not, of course, mutually exclusive approaches, but they do raise questions about what counts as a “good reading” of a work. The strength of this volume, along with the thoughtful approaches it offers to thinking about how religion and faith might figure in Wallace’s work, is that it offers readings that draw on both reader-centric interpretations and author-centric interpretations-as the editors say, some of the contributors look at biographical evidence and “the man behind the words” while other contributors are more interested in pursuing questions about how readers might experience Wallace’s works. And the evidence provided by the archives and Wallace’s biography is not unambiguous-some of it seems to point to a sincere pursuit of and interest in religious and spiritual issues, while some of it seems to confirm Wallace’s own judgment about his religious views: that they are banal.
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The evidence from the archives provided by some of the contributors is interesting in its own right, even if one is not inclined to think of this as relevant to questions about how to read Wallace’s written work. Several contributors (Matt Bucher and Martin Brick, Michael McGowan) cite the Kenyon Commencement speech, published as This is Water (Little, Brown, 2009), as a reliable source of the author’s genuine and sincere thoughts some use archival and biographical evidence to support claims about the religious nature of this work. That question, they might argue, is answered best pragmatically by thinking about what kinds of insights a reader can gain by thinking of Wallace’s writings as offering religious or spiritual insights. Whether Wallace was himself religious might not be relevant to whether we ought to read his writings and the Kenyon Commencement speech as offering religious insight, these suspicious readers might say.
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This might be troublesome for those who are suspicious of appeals to the author’s biography to justify reading an author in a particular way. Some of the contributors to this volume justify reading Wallace as a religious writer by drawing on evidence about what the real, living and breathing Wallace believed. Since Wallace’s readers are not exclusively, or even primarily, literature scholars, the variety of contributors reflects and supports the ways in which Wallace’s readership reaches beyond the academy and beyond traditional disciplinary foci. The editors have included not just literature scholars, but also a podcast host, graduate students, and others who are deeply invested in reading and thinking about David Foster Wallace’s work. It collects work by a wide variety of Wallace readers, and these contributors open up enticing interpretive possibilities for readers. This volume, David Foster Wallace and Religion, reads Wallace as a religious writer.
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But it’s also interesting to read him as offering something more. Sometimes I think that David Foster Wallace was just writing funny and entertaining stories and mimicking other writers. Sometimes a song is just a song about a walrus, of course, but it can be more interesting to think of it as something else. I don’t think we had any idea what we’d do with the messages if we heard them-we were just intrigued by the idea. My friends and I couldn’t figure out how to play the record backward, but we listened intently, hoping to decode it. In the 1970s, a rumor went around among my elementary school friends that there were satanic messages hidden in the Beatles’ song “I am the Walrus.” In order to hear them, though, you had to play the record backward (these were the days of vinyl albums, played on record players).