Foreword to Ntifein Jest by Jenny Saupaugh
This foreword frames Ntifein Jest as a corrective assault on David Foster Wallace's own admission that Infinite Jest should have been more radically disordered but was made readable because otherwise "no one would read it." Williams treats that concession as a cultural crime: the moment difficulty surrendered to market legibility and literary sainthood. Ntifein Jest becomes the book Wallace imagined and refused, a jumbled intervention built from the original sentence material and stripped of narrative comfort, coherence, and readerly reward. The text invokes Vaclav Havel to argue that the existence of an uncompromising work matters apart from reception. Its central claim is severe: destruction can become authorship when it completes the radical form that compromise abandoned.
- DATE:
- January 2, 2025
- DOCUMENT TYPE:
- Letter / Open Letter
- NAMED ARTISTS / FIGURES:
- LG Williams; Jenny Saupaugh; David Foster Wallace; Charlie Rose; Vaclav Havel
- INSTITUTIONS / VENUES:
- The Estate of LG Williams; PCP Press; Charlie Rose; literary marketplace; Generation X literary culture
- KEYWORDS:
- Infinite Jest surrendered to legibility; difficulty refused market; literary sainthood as cultural crime; Ntifein Jest as correction; Wallace concession as betrayal; readable vs unreadable; market legibility attacked