I know we like to spitball poems and writings here. But sometimes it’s nice to have a place to talk about writing, I’m not sure what section is best, so I pick this one.
At least two or three of you know, I like David Foster Wallace. If you haven’t read his work, fine, but you should know about it, and if you read this, you’ll begin to get a sense of what his work might mean to some readers and why it matters so much. You also might glimpse why people hate people like me who get all gushy about Wallace. It’s a tired trope to see brainy, informal people love Wallace. I feel like my love of his stuff is not merely buying into hype. It certainly could be a kind of laziness, and an easy way to feel smart. I generally don’t like too many things. I like the Beatles. I like Marvel. I like Wallace. But seeking an easy way to feel smart is an important sign of something in our culture, and I think Wallace knew this.
The following is a little long but I tried to make it non-boring. It’s strictly my own ideas, not sourced, and I’m not the end all obviously. My reactions and thoughts probably aren’t as good as those of more serious students and scholars. In the end I encourage you to find out for yourself what this writer is about and how it can touch and inform your own life.
He can barely get a sentence out without apologizing for it or qualifying it in ten ways. This is probably a sign of the times in a way I’m too tired to think about, (He never was too tired to think about such things.) And maybe a sign of a highly educated and sensitive person, capable of deep empathy and deep insecurity. The tragedy may be that with all his effort to apologize and qualify, he’s exactly the type who has little to apologize for. Meaning he never is outright mean, shallow, angry, stupid, fallacious, etc. He seems to chiefly want to apologize for his vanity, and it’s often hard to detect any vanity, and he’s apologizing also for imprecision, but it’s hard to detect much imprecision in anything he writes.
Wittgenstein (who Foster references often w/r/t solipsism mainly) famously wrote “whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must remain silent.” Sometimes it seems in philosophy, the more you learn and talk, the more you notice that silence may be about as close as you’re going to get to the truth. You can acquiesce to this silence, or keep talking. If you’re a philosopher who keeps talking, you might sound like Derrida. If you’re a fiction writer, or nonfiction essayist, you might sound like Wallace.
He wants his words to be true, but at the same time knows they can’t ever really be, and he seems almost too aware of exactly which species of vanity generates each word. Therefore he’s never done filling in the gray areas, cleaning out the vanity as he goes, which is probably in a sense the ultimate form of vanity.
In the end, his work mattered to me because of Wallace’s commitment to these gray areas. The ideas and scope in his work betrays what must be called a kind of outsized hubris, offset by an equally outsized humility, spinning in a dynamic equilibrium, a yin and yang. You can tell he hears himself as a preachy, whiny, neurotic know it all, and has to then offset it by being a humble, approachable, self-depricating guy who can switch from deep to banal on a dime. From cerebral to playful.
The fact of his writing is more important to me than the actual writing. It’s not what the writing says that sticks with me, but what it says about the writer, and how the writer wants to seem, and how he himself is painfully aware of his “wanting to seem.” But HOW DFW wants to seem says a lot about how many of us want to seem. And how we want to seem says a lot about our times and culture.
So the question is why does he want to “seem” the way he wants to “seem?” He once said he wrestled with writing from that place that wants to be loved versus that place capable of love. This might be a better way to describe the dichotomy in his writing, the dance of one against the other, or bolstering each other. This dance admits something about modern society thru the lens of a thinking person. “Writing from the place capable of love is the better thing.” He felt it was worthwhile to try to do this, but that it was tricky business, now more than ever. He wrote that loving something more than yourself is the only escape from solipsism, but also, tricky business, again. His work always can be viewed as a fearlessly neuronal excursion into this tricky business.
Wallace of course required lots of meds, suffered from depression and eventually killed himself. While it’s easy to chalk it up to the blameless and contextual vacuum of “mental illness,” you can’t avoid the feeling that his choices were thickly and richly colored by his ideas, his experience of this endless dance and struggle to seem, and to apologize for his desire to seem, and to seem like the apologist, his ability to see just how hard it is to know if you actually really truly Love something outside yourself, or if it’s possible, etc., and I believe his suicide and depression can extend past mere brain chemistry into realms of the human condition, existentially and culturally; that he was “on to something,” a realization so sweeping and terrible, that he had to medicate and eventually end it.
The thing itself that he was onto is partly to blame. Also to blame, his uncanny ability to recognize that thing. He spent more time explaining how to deal with that thing, and less time naming it head on. Consider the video in Infinite Jest, titled “Infinite Jest.” You watch it once, it sends you into a trance and you literally die laughing. An idea …that literally kills you. He wanted the video to be central to the drama, he named the book after it, he wanted to talk around the video without ever showing it to us, talk about his struggle, our struggle, without actually ever revealing what’s in the video. Not showing us that video, in any of his work, was perhaps his one true act of love in his work.
Perhaps Wallace’s life was a battle against the inevitable death that comes after witnessing a deadly idea. For a pen as fine as his, it showed wonderful restraint. It’s hard not to think that he could have killed us with an idea but instead chose to at least TRY to save us from that very same idea, or saving himself and taking us along for the ride. Problem is, he had to sort of show us the bad thing first, which is always dangerous. He did it indirectly, stealthily, carefully. I’m not suggesting he’s a saint. A man can be both a saint and a man, all that’s in between, surely he succumbed to showmanship now and again, he’s human. But he was saintly when he chose to not reveal, literally or figuratively, the content of that video. Whenever he DID reveal a little here or there, it was stealthy, he didn’t elaborate, and God knows he could have.
Sadly, many if not most will mistake his writing for lengthy and dense slacker-speak meets high iq much in the same way people mistake the Beatles for a 9th jazz chord or a specific guitar sound. The veneer and form of his work was more a way of claiming the present tense, validating and celebrating the informal “now” and the tireless, herculean effort required to put it into words. The way he was able to make it sound hip and knowing and weighty betrays the way we WANT to sound hip and knowing and weighty. It’s more than a mirror, it’s the mirror and the special pose we reserve for the mirror, and the sadness of posing in the first place, and a brave commitment to finding a possible answer to that sadness.
