In a recent article, Tim Yu gives a good overview of Wallace's
"deeply ambivalent" relationship to professionalization and the pro-fessionalization of creative writing!' As Yu notes, Wallace's writing repeatedly features top professionals and professional-like figures who specialize in incredibly narrow domains, whose specialization is both key to their wild vocational successes and the very things that degrade their full humanities. The path to virtuoso mastery, it turns out, is also the royal road away from personhood. The troubled figure of the professional is best exemplified, for Yu's Wallace, by the professional athlete. Wallace wrote extensively about the amazing capacities which also are, at the same time, the amazing incapacities of the figure of the tennis pro. Recall how Wallace argues that Tracy Austin is great not despite the vapidity and seeming banal flatness of her memoir, but because of it. The thing that allows the great ge-nius-level tennis pro to be great and genius-level, as Wallace puts it in the case of Austin, is being able to think "nothing at all?"& So one extreme solution to what Jon Baskin calls the "Cartesian trap" of pathological self-consciousness is evacuating yourself of any sense of self in the first place.

Another illuminating metaphor for the simultaneous capacity and incapacity of the professional athlete is Orin Incandenza's "oversized left arm and big left leg." At one point in Infinite Jest, Wallace's narrator describes Orin's "tennis arm" as "roughly churn-sized," and the other arm as having "dimensions" that are merely "human." Again, specialization and professionalization stand in stark opposition to the "human." In this particular case, the distortion of the human happens not because of any lack of consciousness Orin is nothing if not self-aware but as a byproduct of doing one thing over and over again, of radically leaning into some capacities, and of systematically ignoring others.

Creative writing, at least as Wallace saw it in the late 1980s, is no oasis from the perils of professionalization. On Wallace's account, the literary professional seems fated to suffer from what Guillory wants to call a "déformation professionnelle" by virtue of being a professional in the first place. The term "déformation professionnelle" designates the idea that professionals have a tendency to see the world in a partial way, through the lens of their training, rather than from a general or human perspective. Such deformation is not, on Guillory's account, a personal failing of the individual person—or even a negative phenomenon!— but is rather "an unavoidable by-product of the assertion of that autonomy enabling the cultivation of professional expertise to begin with" and a disposition "that insulates such expertise to some extent from the tyranny of the market and from the draconian interventions of the political system."

In laying out this argument, Guillory draws on the famous portrait of the scholar that Friedrich Nietzsche evokes in The Gay Science:

In a scholar's book [Nietzsche writes] there is nearly always something oppressive, oppressed: the "specialist" emerges somehow-his eagerness, his seriousness, his ire, his overestimation of the nook in which he sits and spins, his hunchback every specialist has his hump. Every scholarly book also reflects a soul that has become crooked; every craft makes crooked.

And

One pays dearly for any kind of mastery on earth, where perhaps one pays too dearly for everything; one is master of one's trade at the price of also being its victim.

Of course, in many ordinary cases of professionalization, becoming more specialized wouldn't seem to be that much of a problem, spiritual or otherwise. Sure, you can't write a compelling memoir, but you'll have a prodigious near-miraculous backhand. In the case of the fiction-writer, however, becoming professionalized threatens to take you away from the lived experience of humanity whose careful observation is the very raw material you use to write fiction in the first place. Unfortunately, if you want to be an ambitious fiction-writer, the academy is one of the safer routes to continued survival, if not necessarily flourishing. You might find yourself in a sort of academic prison, yes, but as D. T. Max quotes Wallace telling Steven Moore, "The thing I like about my own prison... is I have tenure in my prison. "

Across these reviews, Wallace consistently prosecutes his own emerging aesthetic project. He engages largely with experimental and postmodern texts that, in one way or another, lose the plot, become too self-involved, too inward-looking. As his review of Acker suggests, there are certain literary artifacts that only an academic could love, and who could love a text that only academics love? Wallace is clearly doing the thinking that will pave the way for Infinite Jest.
Would a book like Infinite Jest only meet the approval of "professional readers," graduate students in everything but name, festooned with guidebooks and eager to do online detective work, or is the form of a book like Infinite fest a route not to a cartoonishly large "churn-like" emotional and intellectual life, but rather a perfectly normal-sized-fully and merely human existence?