Conjuring David Foster Wallace’s Ghost: Prosopopeia, Whitmanian Intimacy and the Queer Potential of Infinite Jest and The Pale King

Abstract

This article analyzes the ways in which Wallace’s fiction stages homosocial intimacy between the (male) author figure and (male) reader through the conceptual metaphor of ghosts in both Infinite Jest and the unfinished novel The Pale King . I specifically contrast Wallace’s use of prosopopeia, or inducing the reader to create the author’s face in moments of undecidability, with that of one of his under-explored influences, Walt Whitman. Whitman used the technique to stage an intimate, homosexual encounter in the future between himself and his imagined, posthumous readership. Through this contrast, the article demonstrates that Wallace’s narrative devices are particularly attuned to the production of the intimacies of male homosocial desire. I borrow my meaning of this term from Eve Sedgwick’s Between Men (1985), in which she suggests that masculinity, by defining itself in opposition to male homosexuality, cannot acknowledge intimacy between heterosexual men as a manifestation of desire. Considering Wallace’s revisions of both the conceptual metaphor of ghosts as well as use of prosopopeia across both novels, the article argues that the homosocial intimacy staged between the masculinized author figure and his primarily, though not exclusively, white, heterosexual reading public is a fundamental effect of his aesthetic practice. However, the discontinuity between male homosocial desire and male homosexuality make this effect a too often unarticulated component of Wallace’s fiction and reception.