Article
Our Psychic Living RoomA lot of important-sounding people will tell you that Infinite Jest is a book about addiction, obsession, consumerism (and how it’s related to the two prenominate things), passivity, power, and the need to find order in one’s life. They are right, but if they stop there, they overlook the fact that the book is also about trying your best to be a good, kind human being in a hostile world; about telling the Truth; about admitting your vulnerabilities and sincerely seeking help from others. In certain cases, characters must trust their lives to the inbound goodness of other people, which is a scary thing to do in an incredibly self-centered age.
The reader learns quickly that an important part of cultivating this inbound goodness is forgoing the numb passivity that controlled substances induce, a message we may recognize from medicated, dystopian novels like Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Gately awakens Lazarus-like from a twenty-year doze by finally kicking the Demerol monkey. Hal realizes that his prodigious marijuana consumption is only harming him and tries to stop. The reader gets the impression that those who make a good-faith effort to fight against the passivity will emerge triumphant. Those victors are Wallace’s saints. They are the ones who actually give a shit about something besides themselves.
The Tin Man's Legacy
Wallace was on this earth for too short a time, but it was good while we had him. For a couple of years there, we knew just what Hal Incandenza meant by “thought-prophylaxis”; we marveled at John McCain’s story and agreed that state fairs are weird and that tennis is a great metaphor for life. We willingly gave ourselves over to Wallace’s mind and personality—we devoured his output, and we wanted him to write more. We wondered what he had to say about basketball or antiabortion activists or the American Southwest. We felt welcome in his head. And Wallace wasn’t condescending. He bent over backward to help us understand what he was trying to say: he agonized over word choice, tried to explain away ambiguities with footnotes, and packed as much expository detail into every sentence as he possibly could. And ultimately it turned out that what he was trying to say wasn’t that complicated. We read Wallace with the attitude of a meek old man at a peep show, simultaneously marveling and shuddering at what was on display. We would never think of putting ourselves on display in the same way—we don’t even know how. But of course we couldn’t look away.
Wallace’s intellect became our psychic living room, the place we went to be comforted and reassured: “Yes, you’re normal. Don’t worry, someone else has already had this exact same thought.” All this reassurance would make us think, “If this guy has been having these thoughts, then maybe I’m not alone in this world. Maybe there are even more people out there with the same thoughts as mine.” Then we’d get to wondering about the billions of other minds at work just like ours, like the mind of a stockbroker in Tennessee and the mind of a toddler in Costa Rica and the mind of a mother in the Congo and the mind of a construction worker in Lebanon, and we’d imagine how all their thoughts are knit together in the same way ours are. And we’d think, “Isn’t this whole thing miraculous, the fact that we can share all this stuff and the only thing we’ve got to do is be human? Now this is one hell of an idea. This is something I can really get behind! What’s the point of hermiting yourself in your own brain if there’s a whole world out there full of love and fear and pity and compassion?”
And that is exactly what David Foster Wallace wanted us to think. •
Rebekah Frumkin is a contributing editor to The Common Review and a junior at Carleton College. Her story "Monster" is featured in The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2009.
Great job delving into DFW's fiction and addressing the oft-overlooked fact that his fiction and non-fiction tend to differ wildly.
Like you pointed out, there is a lot of emerging material on DFW, be it commentary, professional scholarship or amatuer scholarship. I'm concerned with how much of this zeros in on his death and/or depression.
I think Wallace's death has led to a sharper critical eye on his subject matter that dealt with depression. Our intro to Kate Gompert has been read much more closely since 2008. 'The Depressed Person' has been heavily scrutinized, as has the brilliant 'Good Old Neon.'
I worry that some of the posthumous examinations of DFW are missing the forest from the trees. As you (and the likes of Lipsky) have pointed out, DFW's primary concern was to capture the feeling of being ALIVE today, and the firepower it takes to get to that point. He was also intensely private about his own depression, and wrote often on the horrors of solipsism. I think you combine these factors, and you have a writer who was interested in far more than dropping hints and herrings about whatever darkness may have been in his own head.
I'm glad there's so much out there that still celebrates the humanity of his work, rather than grinding away at the factors of his death.
This is the first time I've commented on anything online - be it a blog, article, whatever. I've been a Wallace fan since a couple years before he died, and have friends and even family members who share my fandom. That means I get to talk about Dave quite often. And what all my conversations about Dave have come down to is perfectly distilled in your piece here. Reading this was edifying, enlightening, and ultimately gave me the feeling Dave gave all of us, which is, "I am not alone."
Because Infinite Jest is a large book, doesn’t make it great. I found it entertaining and well written but I also found myself thinking that I was reading a Bret Easton Ellis novel. Ditto his short stories. As an essayist he proved his knowledge of a subject and skill to present an argument in a witty and dogmatic manner. But the history of literature is littered with such essayists; very few of whom can be seen as ‘genius’, just simply able in the work that they did.
The speed at which critics are so apt to apply the ‘genius’ tag on work that is pretty ordinary, is not only lazy but also a sign of pessimism: they feel there really is nothing of great substance out there.
I am aware that it is readers who first ‘discovered’ Wallace and forced academia and critics alike to look at it. However the role of academia and critics is one of leadership in suggesting particular works, they should not be taking their cue from a bunch of enthusiastic readers. Much of this article seems to simply be a rehash of views that have been posted on the internet by Wallace’s fans.
I know this is a throwaway comment, but really now? "A blogger I’ll call A. N." happens to be about as well published as you are (BANR aside), and the post you quote from appeared on HTMLgiant, one of the biggest, trendiest (I use the term neutrally) litblogs around. I'd *like* to believe there are hordes of teenaged bloggers like him, but he just isn't a representative "child blogger", as you so winningly put it.
Still more relevantly, Alec Niedenthal (who, by the way, you really should have credited--how would you feel about this essay being discussed, unlinked to, as by "A critic I'll call R.F."?) is barely younger than you are. It makes your dissociation from his reading and implicit identification with the "contingent of well-read adults. . . [who] puzzle through the text a lot more carefully" rather puzzling. Maybe there's some huge in-joke here that I'm missing, but otherwise you could probably learn a few things from DFW re: the supposedly childish matter of "the struggle to simply be in one’s own skin."
One last thing, which I might have been kind enough to leave out if you'd shown a little more charity yourself: everything in this essay following "A lot of important-sounding people" could have been replaced by a link to Wallace's graduation address, which a search for "Wallace graduation" turns up immediately. Yes, DFW was all about empathy and connection and human decency at base. We know this--he told us so.
I know this is a throwaway comment, but really now? "A blogger I’ll call A. N." happens to be about as well published as you are (BANR aside), and the post you quote from appeared on HTMLgiant, one of the biggest, trendiest (I use the term neutrally) litblogs around. I'd *like* to believe there are hordes of teenaged bloggers like him, but he just isn't a representative "child blogger", as you so winningly put it.
Still more relevantly, Alec Niedenthal (who, by the way, you really should have credited; how would you feel about this essay being discussed, unlinked to, as by "A critic I'll call R.F."?) is barely younger than you are. It makes your dissociation from his reading and implicit identification with the "contingent of well-read adults. . . [who] puzzle through the text a lot more carefully" rather puzzling. Maybe there's some huge in-joke here that I'm missing, but otherwise you could probably learn a few things from DFW re: the supposedly childish matter of "the struggle to simply be in one’s own skin."
One last thing, which I might have been kind enough to leave out if you'd shown a little more charity yourself: everything in this essay following "A lot of important-sounding people" could have been replaced by a link to Wallace's graduation address, which a search for "Wallace graduation" turns up immediately. Yes, DFW was all about empathy and connection and human decency at base. We know this--he told us so.
In DFW essay on irony, he describes what he hopes future writers will do. But, in effect, I believe he's simply describing his own work:
"The next real literary “rebels” in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles. Who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue. These anti-rebels would be outdated, of course, before they even started. Dead on the page. Too sincere. Clearly repressed. Backward, quaint, naïve, anachronistic. Maybe that’ll be the point. Maybe that’s why they’ll be the next real rebels.
Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval. The old postmodern insurgents risked the gasp and squeal: shock, disgust, outrage, censorship, accusations of socialism, anarchism, nihilism. Today’s risks are different. The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the “Oh how banal.” To risk accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Of overcredulity. Of softness. Of willingness to be suckered by a world of lurkers and starers who fear gaze and ridicule above imprisonment without law. Who knows."
Thank you. You've done me a personal service. Since his death, I have a read a number of articles about Mr. Wallace, some of them quite interesting to me. I've even, I think, read an essay by him.
Your article has now convinced me that I do not want to read him and need not worry about that anymore.
I hope your arrogance eats you alive.
Regards
Dan