摘要：Clare Hayes-Brady’s The Unspeakable Failures of David Foster Wallace: Language,Identity, and Resistance is a bold contribution to the burgeoning field of Wallace studies.Indeed, the book appears at what feels like a pivotal time for the field. In theknowledge that Wallace “criticism has turned up a range of ideas that have becomedoctrinal” (iix), and yet also anticipating “the development of a new critical perspective,a second wave of scholarship” (193), The Unspeakable offers a fascinating snapshot ofhow far Wallace studies has come, where it now stands, and where it may go.The organizing principle of Hayes-Brady’s study is failure; a perhaps surprisingapproach to a writer whose work continues to inspire a voluminous amount ofscholarly and popular praise. For Hayes-Brady, failure in Wallace’s texts is not a sign ofdeficiency, but opportunity: it is the “generative trigger” (195) of his “concern withhuman connection and the establishment of the self among selves” (93). “Generativefailure” (5) is in fact the term Hayes-Brady gives to one of the three modes of failureshe identifies in his work. This refers to how “our inevitable failure to communicatesuccessfully, due to the fundamental absence inherent in textuality” (5) generates anawareness of the other’s alterity, the existence of which forestalls the solipsisticdelusion “that one’s own consciousness is responsible for the whole universe” (5). Thesecond mode Hayes-Brady identifies is structural failure, in which the capacity forcommunication is missing, whilst the third, abject failure, entails “the total failure of anattempt to communicate” (4). These latter two do not figure as heavily in the book’sanalyses. Indeed, Hayes-Brady’s preference for generative failure signals her largelyupbeat estimation, throughout this study, of Wallace’s “redemptive ambition forliterature” (22).
