ABSTRACT
Chapter 2 examines his symbolic use of anatomy, specifically in relation to his frequent allegories of writing, his meta-recursive reflections upon reflection. If much scholarship has to do with unpicking Wallace’s interest in the neurological, a great deal is also devoted to unthreading his complex engagement with postmodernism, metafiction, and writing in the postmodern and post-postmodern period/condition. In this chapter, I argue that Wallace uses three key and recurring corporeal motifs to interrogate the act and the perils of writing, and of reflecting both on the process, and the reader’s reception of those texts. The deformed body is figured by Wallace, I argue, as a genetically imperfect body-text, one that evidences the difficulty of realising intentionality in the act of giving expression to thought in the malformed or failed text, then, which is the genetic equivalent, a text-body. Another key image is the spine, of both book and body; for Wallace, the spine is used to indicate a fascination with and interrogation of metafiction, reflexivity, and debilitating recursion. It is this image, of the contortionist, for example, that allows Wallace to diagnose the dangers of in-bent and self-oriented literature. Finally, the chapter discusses Wallace’s interest in shitting, seeing it as another allegory of writing, an act of quasi-parturition, one that receives peculiarly detailed treatment in his works, most tellingly perhaps in ‘The Suffering Chanel.’
