标题：‘They All Sound Like David Foster <i>Wallace</i>’: Syntax and Narrative in <i>Infinite Jest, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, Oblivion</i> and <i>The Pale King</i>
摘要：What kind of syntactic arrangement produces the distinctive feel of a Wallace
sentence, and how does sentence structure relate to Wallace’s wider
themes, the larger narrative structures of his fiction, and the construction
of his fictional worlds? The length and complexity of Wallace’s sentences
has often been remarked on, and sometimes satirised, but this essay breaks
new ground by looking in detail at the syntactic structure of Wallace’s sentences
to understand the work done by that structure in the creation both
of character and of ontologically complex fictional worlds. The essay is
structured around close readings of individual sentences from Infinite Jest,
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, Oblivion and The Pale King. I show that
in Infinite Jest syntactic complexity is associated with addiction and with
intractable psychological binds. Moving forward from Infinite Jest, I argue,
Wallace pushes his fiction in two distinct directions. Brief Interviews with
Hideous Men focuses on voice, the format of the ‘Brief Interviews’ in particular
allowing Wallace to represent character mimetically through speech.
Oblivion, on the other hand, indulges Wallace’s characteristic authorial voice
in all its oppressive maximalism, in order to explore its unique narrative
possibilities. In particular, Wallace uses complex, hypotactically structured
sentences to create fictional worlds in which the relationship between the
actual and the conditional or hypothetical is often unstable. In The Pale
King, despite its incompleteness, Wallace shows signs of achieving, I argue,
a synthesis of the two, fusing the narrative and ontological complexity of
Oblivion with the mimetic polyphony of Brief Interviews.
