Chapter 2 - A Meeting of Minds

Summary

Wallace was a writer deeply aware of his debts to other authors. One such was Vladimir Nabokov, whom Wallace referred to as one of “the real geniuses, the writers who weathered real shock and invented this stuff in contemporary fiction.” Brian Boyd’s pioneering work on Nabokov argues that our need to close-read Nabokov’s novelistic puzzle pieces serves as an allegory for how Nabokov felt we should pay attention to the natural world and all its rich patterning. This chapter uses Boyd’s work on Nabokov as a lens to examine how Wallace engages in a similar practice, using reading as a metonymic practice, a dry run of sorts for encountering the world. The chapter identifies key differences between Wallace and Nabokov, specifically Wallace’s ethical commitment to empathy and otherness, but traces the rich and untapped overlaps between the two authors, examining solipsism, self-reflexivity, allusions and an abiding fascination with both the workings of human consciousness and the relationship between author and reader, among other thematic and formal commonalities. Developing a poetics of attention that is taken up elsewhere in the volume, this chapter works to elucidate how Wallace, after and against Nabokov, used practical literary strategies and tools to persuade and teach his readers to practice empathy in and toward the world.