“Turning a Man’s Life Right Around”: Wallace’s Rehabilitation of Frederick Exley in IJ

s Rehabilitation of Frederick Exley in IJAmong the throng of influences, literary and philosophical, major and minor, patent and hidden, absorbed by Infinite Jest, Ulysses, along with Hamlet, is among the most central.Joyce's magnum opus serves for Wallace as a model and inspiration not just for particular setpieces, in the way, say, that DeLillo's End Zone provides the intertext for the Eschaton episode or Pynchon's "The Courier's Tragedy" (from The Crying of Lot 49) serves as the antecedent of the "Blood Sister" sequence, but for the very gestalt and make-up of Wallace's novel as a whole.Its encyclopedism, its verbal maximalism, its kaleidoscopic play with narrative techniques -all the elements that give it its burgeoning, prodigious identity derive from its Joycean precedent.So, too, does the dynamic between the novel's main characters harken back to its predecessor.1 Both novels follow the paths of two protagonists, one a melancholic authorial surrogate and the other an extroverted Everyman, through their respective fictional worlds; and the opposition between their temperaments becomes the basis of an implicit metafictional argument about the novel's own condition of possibility.The younger figure needs to attain the broader sensibilitymore open, more humane, more resourceful --exhibited by the older man and so realize the capacities that will allow him to body forth the fictional world that contains them, an achievement to which the existence of the novel in the reader's hands self-referentially attests.Of course, Wallace introduces several twists on this correlation.The invocation of the Joycean analog provides a basis of expectation which allows him to throw into relief the distinctive features of his own thematic concerns.So the climactic meeting of the two protagonist towards which Joyce's novel builds and which Wallace's reader hopes for is withheld; or rather, it has already been hinted at in the course of Hal's rambling soliloquy in the novel's opening section set at an unspecified time after the rest of novel's action --an epilogue given in a flashback in a prolog that takes place after the events to be narrated in the novel -when he fleetingly alludes to their meeting, along with the Canadian John Wayne, at the grave of Hal's father.That this meeting restages the graveyard scene in Hamlet, from which the novel derives its very title, while the grave is that of James Orin Incandenza, or JOI, the promethean auteur who embodies the novel's parody/homage to Joyce, suggests the thoroughness with which Ulysses and Hamlet are entwined in Wallace's novel.For all that in his portrayal of Gately Wallace carries out an ambitious, audacious reworking of Joyce, that portrayal, as I will demonstrate in what follows, draws upon yet another intertext: A Fan's Notes by Frederick Exley.The largely forgotten Exley might on the face of it seem like an unlikely author for Wallace to pair with Joyce in the creation of a character so important to his project.2 Yet Wallace's use of Exley in the fashioning of his Joycean Everyman is not only an example of his procedure, a fundamental imperative of Wallace's poetics, of combining and layering his intertexts, but also of the radical conception of intertextuality in which he imitated not only Joyce's work, but the very process, the working method, by which Joyce brought that work into being.3 Just as Joyce based the portrayal of Bloom on his friend, the Italian novelist, Italo Svevo, author of the seminal modernist work, The Conscience of Zeno, Wallace, following the same path, draws on the biographical details of a contemporary novelist for his portrayal of Gately.* The big difference is that whereas Joyce drew upon direct knowledge of his actual friend to form his fictional character, there is no evidence that Wallace knew or had any dealings with the flesh-and-blood Exley, who died of alcoholism in 1991, * Both Joyce and Svevo were working on their respective novels in Trieste during the war; Ulysses appeared in 1922, The Conscience of Zeno, with Joyce's help, in 1923.

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