Chapter 24 - David Foster Wallace and Disability

Summary

Disability of varying kinds permeates Wallace’s writing, which persistently displayed varying degrees of emotional, cognitive, physical or metaphysical disability. Although having no discernible interest in disabilities studies as an academic discipline, Wallace’s writing evidences a persistent conception that persons are definitionally disabled by the motor, volitional and agentive impediments posed by the simple but universal fact of embodiment, with which, he argues, we all “crave” to be “reconciled.” Employing various approaches from phenomenology (Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Edmund Husserl) to disabilities studies (Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Lennard J. Davis), this chapter offers illustrative examples of the three primary forms of atypicality in Wallace’s works: anomalous bodies, cognitive disability, and textual malformation. Through these, this chapter provides a context of disability within which Wallace’s works are situated and which enables insights into his wider literary and humanistic concerns.