ABSTRACT
Critics have typically retread the same Barthesian ground when discussing Wallace and authorship, arguing that the “flesh-and-blood” Wallace is absent from the text. This chapter shows that Wallace critiqued Barthes in his own writing. I set out the key scientific sources for Wallace, and explain the specific model of the embodied mind that Wallace drew from Tor Nørretranders and Timothy D. Wilson, a model that informed Wallace’s fiction and his accounts of himself as a writer. Drawing on the epigraph to The Pale King from the poet Frank Bidart, we see that both Wallace and Bidart developed a poetics of embodiment with which to critique postmodern theories about the death of the author and the dissolution of the self. Wallace takes the metaphor of the human “form” from Bidart both to articulate the relationship between mind and body in his characters and to describe the model of literary influence that informs his writing process.
