Chapter 30 - David Foster Wallace’s Ecologies

Summary

Wallace’s landscapes are haunted by capitalist interventions in the natural world, from the black sand of the Great Ohio Desert to the Great Convexity/Concavity that sits like a pustule between the United States and Canada. This chapter considers Wallace’s writing as an ecocritical gesture that connects human solipsism, hypercapitalism and the despoiling of the natural world. In tracing this connection, the chapter operates on the central theme of disgust, a recurrent and powerful motif throughout Wallace’s body of work. Working alongside the chapter on regional geographies, the chapter shows how Wallace troubled and complicated the regional archetypes that populate his writing by using images of the unheimlich and the grotesque, uniting the threatening, the decomposing and the simply absurd to highlight the depredations of the late capitalist system on the (American) landscape.