Essays: Our Best Hope

From "Why I Write," by Simon Schama:

In one of his more breathtaking performances (which is saying something), David Foster Wallace, at a state fair, moves from looking hard at the prize pigs: “Swine have fur! I never thought of swine as having fur. I’ve actually never been up very close to swine, for olfactory reasons” to thinking, with Swiftian mercilessness, not just about what happens when the pigs are industrially processed, but how we contrive to deal with that routine slaughter. “I’m struck, amid the pig’s screams and wheezes, by the fact that these agricultural pros do not see their stock as pets or friends. They are just in the agribusiness of weight and meat ... even at the fair their products continue to drool and smell and ingest their own excrement and scream, and the work goes on. I can imagine what they think of us, cooing at the swine: we fairgoers don’t have to deal with the business of breeding and feeding our meat; our meat simply materialises at the corn-dog stand, allowing us to separate our healthy appetites from fur and screams and rolling eyes. We tourists get to indulge our tender animal-rights feelings with our tummies full of bacon.” (“Ticket to the Fair”, 1994).

This passage does everything Montaigne would have wanted from his posterity: self-implication without literary narcissism; a moral illumination built from a physical experience. Like the best non-fiction long-form writing, it essays a piece of the meaning of what it’s like to live – or, in the case of Hitchens’ last magnificent writing, to die – in a human skin. Essay writing and reading is our resistance to the pygmy-fication of the language animal; our shrinkage into the brand, the sound bite, the business platitude; the solipsistic tweet. Essays are the last, heroic stand for the seriousness of prose entertainment; our best hope of liberating text from texting.

The Accidental Progenitor

An interesting comment from n+1 about the place of David Foster Wallace in recent rhetorical history:

The accidental progenitor of the blogorrheic style is David Foster Wallace. What distinguishes Wallace’s writing from the prose it begot is a fusion of the scrupulous and the garrulous; all of our colloquialisms, typically diffusing a mist of vagueness over the world, are pressed into the service of exactness. To a generation of writers, the DFW style was the sound of telling the truth, as — in an opposite way — the flat declaratives and simplified vocabulary of Hemingway were for a different generation. 

Saunders Does It Again

George Saunders is one of the writers who can make me cry. He did it again with this new story, "Tenth of December"—in which, as he did in "Escape from Spiderhead," Saunders seems to be working through his feelings about the suicide of his friend and artistic compatriot David Foster Wallace.

A teacher of writing at Syracuse, Saunders is also a reliably perceptive commentator on his own work and on the craft of fiction. This Q&A with Deborah Treisman is no exception. Here's a nice bit:

I think fiction isn’t so good at being for or against things in general—the rhetorical argument a short story can make is only actualized by the accretion of particular details, and the specificity of these details renders whatever conclusions the story reaches invalid for wider application.

The Pale King Begins

Over at The Millions they've got an exclusive look at the opening sentence of Wallace's forthcoming posthumous novel The Pale King.

At first glance, it seems to me to have echoes of the beginnings of Joyce's Finnegans Wake and, especially, Cormac McCarthy's Suttree, of which we know DFW was a fan.

Meaning and Sound

More than two years after David Foster Wallace's death, his reputation continues to grow and the conversation about his work only increases in its intensity and pervasiveness. You see his name popping up all the time. For example, he gets mentioned briefly in this Ken Auletta article about the CEO of America On-Line, and in this Adam Haslett review-essay about Stanley Fish's new book, How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One.

Haslett argues that "Wallace’s anxious, perseverating sentences are arguably the most innovative in recent American literature":

Take the first sentence of David Foster Wallace’s story, “The Depressed Person”: “The depressed person was in terrible and unceasing emotional pain, and the impossibility of sharing or articulating this pain was itself a component of the pain and a contributing factor in its essential horror.” By mixing heightened feeling and unrelenting repetition (“pain”, “pain”, “pain”) with a Latinate, clinically declarative voice (“component”, “contributing factor”), Wallace delivers his readers right where he wants them: inside the hellish disconnect between psychic pain and the modern means of describing it. The rhythm of the sentence is perfectly matched to its positive content. Indeed, from a writer’s point of view the two aren’t separate. If we could separate meaning from sound, we’d read plot summaries rather than novels.

I particularly like Haslett's final point. It's one that I try desperately to make to my freshmen when I see them furtively reading their Sparknotes before a class on the Odyssey or Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass or Huck Finn or Romeo and Juliet: if you're just trying to cram information from a pre-digested summary, you're missing the biggest reason for reading in the first place—to learn how to experience a book.

Escape from Spiderhead

**Spoiler Alert**

George Saunders's story "Escape from Spiderhead," in the current New Yorker, has echoes of Daniel Keyes's "Flowers For Algernon," as well as some previous Saunders stories: the clinical horror of "93990" and the clinical entrapment of "Jon"; along with an ending that's quite similar to the ending of "CommComm." At times it veers on the edge of the thought-experiment quality that made "In Persuasion Nation" and The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil less successful as fully realized fictional worlds. But, on the whole, it's a gripping story, a "wild ride," to use Saunders's own term from this fascinating and illuminating interview with Deborah Treisman—and it lingers in one's mind.

In the interview, Saunders asserts that "if the writer is doing his job the story will have an understory that steadily becomes more apparent." In Saunders's own best work, the "understories" are multifaceted and echo off each other in interesting ways. Thus "Jon" can be a re-working of Plato's cave allegory, a satire of our modern advertising-soaked brains, an intiation story, as well as a human drama "about having to rise to the occasion of love," as Saunders puts it.

One of the understories in "Escape from Spiderhead," I think, is the suicide of David Foster Wallace, who was not only a friend of George Saunders but also very much akin to him as an artist.

Though another of Wallace's friends, Jonathan Franzen, dismisses the notion that DFW's suicide can be explained as being the result of a chemical imbalance, most accounts of Wallace's final months make it clear that he had gone off his normal meds because he disliked the side effects, but that the change in medication left him adrift, feeling the kind of terrifying depression that a character in Infinite Jest memorably compares to being in a top floor of a burning building, weighing the fear of immolation against the fear of jumping out the window to one's death. It seems to me that, in fact, recognizing the chemical aspect to Wallace's suicide is actually part of a humane and sympathetic response.

"Escape from Spiderhead" forces us to think about chemicals, about how much of what we think of as our identities depends upon the chemicals that our bodies produce. The prisoner test subjects in the story are all equipped with "MobiPaks" by which researchers intravenously pump drugs into them. These drugs can make them obedient, articulate, or sexually erect. Indeed, they can make them fall in love. Or they can make them suicidally depressed.

In the climax of the story, the main character chooses to dose himself with Darkenfloxx, which has already driven one test subject to destroy herself, in order to avoid being a party to the death of yet another. Here's the result:

Then came the horror: worse than I’d ever imagined.... Then I was staggering around the Spiderhead, looking for something, anything. In the end, here’s how bad it got: I used a corner of the desk.

It's a horrifyingly succinct description of suicide—and the first thing I thought of as I read it was David Foster Wallace, and how his death could be summed up just as briefly and horrifyingly: belt, patio rafter. Also, how Wallace's death, judging by his own descriptions of suicidal depression, was probably precipitated by just this type of unbearable psychic pain.

Saunders's story, perhaps at some level inspired by its author's response to his friend's suicide, moves beyond Franzen's snarkily dismissive statement about chemical imbalances and confronts us instead with profound mysteries: What if our personalities, our actions, our happiness or sadness are, in large part, determined by the chemicals in our bodies, our brains? How do we understand ourselves and each other? How does that affect our notion of morality? How should that influence the organization of our societies? What does it mean to be human? To be humane?

Red Dragon is a Hard Novel

From an interesting little Newsweek piece about the DFW archive:

His class materials take up a couple of boxes in the Ransom archive, providing readers with the opportunity to see which essays and stories Wallace assigned, and then read the professor’s own marked copies of the works. You can see the lines of Lorrie Moore’s short story “People Like That Are the Only People Here” that Wallace thought were either funny or “bad”—as well as how Wallace saw that Stephen King made the potentially stock character of Carrie into a fuller portrait. (When Wallace assigned genre fiction to his students, he warned them against slacking off. “Red Dragon is a hard novel, at least the way we’ll be reading it,” he wrote in one handout.)

Of course, some of us already knew the closeness with which Wallace read (and even, some might say, plagiarized) Thomas Harris's novel.

The Writer and the Reader

The late David Foster Wallace, from Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, as reviewed in the NY Times today:

"If the writer does his job right, what he basically does is remind the reader of how smart the reader is,” he says. Wallace contrasts literature with the electronic media, especially television, an amusement that is his own personal weakness, an actual addiction. “One of the insidious lessons about TV is the meta-lesson that you’re dumb. This is all you can do. This is easy, and you’re the sort of person who really just wants to sit in a chair and have it easy."

DFW in the Margins

Here you can look through David Foster Wallace's comments on a student paper about Cormac McCarthy's Suttree.

One highlight: Wallace underlines the word problematize and notes, "This is a bullshit academic word. Shun it. Fly it. Trust me," a comment that wittily alludes to the final line of Suttree. In his later comments, Wallace at least twice uses the word problematize himself (though he puts scare quotes around it) to critique the student's own assertions.

Overall, I like the image of Wallace that comes through his comments. He seems like a decent human being with a good sense of humor, and I'm impressed that he gave such time and attention to this guy's paper—balancing criticism with lots of encouragement. He also balances grammatical corrections with commentary on the content of the paper.

In the end, Wallace pronounces the essay "Magnificent" and gives it an A+++. He then assigns a penalty for "syntax, grandiloquence" and knocks the grade down to an A+.

DFW's Copy of Suttree

The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin has acquired David Foster Wallace's papers. Here you can look at some books from Wallace's library, along with the notes he's scribbled into the first page.

Check out Wallace's copy of Suttree (he's drawn fangs, mustache, and glasses on Cormac McCarthy's face) at the bottom of the list.

I would consider driving down to Texas if I could flip through the rest of Wallace's copy of this book. Anybody wanna go with me?

Rival Genres of Reading

From Sam Anderson's reflection on how reading and novels changed in the last decade:

The DFW generation’s primary technological bugaboo was TV, a rival narrative engine that both attracted and repelled. (See Wallace’s classic essay “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” in which he calls TV “both medicine and poison.”) Novelists in the aughts, however, had to contend with a very different bugaboo. The technology that infinitely distracted us this decade, sometimes even to the point of death—the entertainment that tore us away from work and family and prevented us from immersing ourselves in complex meganovels from the noble old-timey decades of yore—was not a passive, cartridge-based viewing experience but largely a new form of reading: the massive archive of linked documents known as the World Wide Web. TV, in comparison, looks like a fairly simple adversary: Its flickering images lure readers away from books altogether. The Internet, on the other hand, invades literature on its home turf. It has created, in the last ten years, all kinds of new and potent rival genres of reading—the blog, the chat, the tweet, the comment thread—genres that seem not only to siphon our attention but to change the way our brains process text.

Influence

In this post at Infinite Summer, Wallace honcho Matt Bucher delves into influences on Infinite Jest.

His first two examples are well-documented but not surprising: Mary Karr, sure—she dated DFW; Don DeLillo—no surprise there.

But then things get interesting: Thomas Harris! And Bucher backs it up with a passage-to-passage comparison between Red Dragon and IJ that is simply stunning. One might even be tempted to call DFW a plagiarist (if not for the fact that he re-writes Harris with such idiosyncratic brilliance).

For the sockdolager, though, Bucher draws a parallel to the oldest of old-school Nintendo games. And, I have to admit, it makes sense.

(He also argues, persuasively, that DFW was sincere in this list he submitted for a book that compiled the top ten favorite books of various writers. I always figured it was a joke, and a rather snarky one at that.)

Good stuff.

The Idea of the Hero

Kathleen Fitzpatrick, one of David Foster Wallace's colleagues at Pomona, recalled this about DFW:

He was, in fact, extremely fond of The Wire -- he stopped me in the hall one day last year and said, look, I really want to sit down and pick your brain about this, because I'm really developing the conviction that the best writing being done in America today is being done for The Wire. Am I crazy to think that?

I just finished watching Season One of The Wire (I know, where have I been?). I binged on it, in fact: thirteen episodes in four days.

I can see why Wallace was so impressed, of course. In one sense, The Wire seems to embody what Wallace was attempting in Infinite Jest: a multilayered portrait of a huge cast of characters at a variety of socioeconomic levels.

I was also thinking about the show in relation to the essay that Hal Incandenza, in IJ, writes for his Introduction to Entertainment Studies course. The essay, as you may recall, compares Chief Steve McGarrett of Hawaii Five-0 and Captain Frank Furillo of Hill Street Blues, suggesting that they are "useful for seeing how our North American idea of the hero changed" from the 1970s to the 1980s.

McGarrett, Hal argues, "is a classically modern hero of action." His cases are one-dimensional puzzles with clear solutions, and he characteristically homes in on the truth with single-minded clarity.

Furillo, on the other hand, "is a bureaucrat, and his heroism is bureaucratic, with a genius for navigating cluttered fields." He handles multiple cases at a time while fending off distractions from colleagues and family members. He is "what used to be designated a 'post'-modern hero"—a "heroic part of the herd, responsible for all of what he is part of, responsible to everyone, his lonely face as placid under pressure as a cow's face."

(Incidentally, David Lipsky's Rolling Stone piece, published shortly after his suicide, quotes Wallace saying that Hill Street Blues "was a really important show to me.")

"But what comes next?" Hal asks at the end of his essay. Hal predicts that we await "the hero of non-action, the catatonic hero, the one beyond calm, divorced from all stimulus, carried here and there across sets by burly extras whose blood sings with retrograde amines." (This unsupported conclusion gets Hal's grade knocked down to a B/B+.)

Arguably, that's what Don Gately becomes in the final couple hundred pages of IJ, but what about The Wire? How do this show and its heroes fit into the evolution that Hal sketches in his seventh-grade essay?

Granted, I've only watched the first season, and I've never seen a single episode of Hill Street, but it seems to me that The Wire's innovation is that it moves away from the idea of a single hero and toward the idea of a team. We may be tempted to see Jimmy McNulty as the McGarrett/Furillo figure early on (more Furillo than McGarrett), but gradually the other cops gain complexity and importance—Greggs, Daniels, Freamon, even Pryzbylewski. It's a cluttered field that's being navigated by a web of characters, all of whom are influencing each other and constantly revising the nature of the field itself.

And it's not just the cops, of course; the show also develops the complex humanity of the drug dealers—D'Angelo Barksdale, Stringer Bell, Boadie, etc.—and of strippers and addicts and more. Over and over again, the show takes character who seem peripheral extras (figurants, as they're called in IJ), and turns them into important, deep characters. It hurts us, for example, when sixteen-year-old Wallace gets shot.

In fact, the show complicates the notion of the hero, dramatizing the moral failings even of "real police" like Bunk and Jimmy, the redeeming moments for cops who seem seriously flawed (e.g., Rawls and Herc), the dawning compassion and awareness in a killer like D'Angelo, the moral code of the bandit Omar, and the struggles of a junkie like Bubbles (who I found much more compelling, incidentally, than IJ's junkie Poor Tony).

The notion of heroism is embodied not in a single character, but rather in a kind of free-floating and malleable ideal—"real police," for instance, or "the code" that Omar says a man must live by. It's a question of meaning. Is it worth it? Jimmy wonders after Greggs gets shot up. Is it worth it? Greggs wonders as she considers her girlfriend's wish that she quit police work. Are we still police? the cops ask themselves after collaborating with the cold-blooded killer Omar.

There's self-interest and careerism on one side, "real police" and a "code" on the other. But given the implacability of the drug trade and the pervasiveness of the corruption, the show challenges the idea that the heroic work of "real police" actually makes much of a difference at all. And is it worth it if it breaks your girlfriend's heart, or if your family falls apart in the meantime?

It's a Sisyphean project, "real police" work, in an existentialist world. McNulty, Daniels, Herc, Greggs, Freamon and others have to create meaning for themselves, live by a code of their own devising, and one which they may not even fully understand (as in Greggs's story of why she wanted to be a cop—"Here ya go, rook."). And, importantly, they create this meaning not as heroic lonely faces in an anonymous herd, but as fallible teammates who develop deep and real relationships with each other.

Words, Words, Words

I read Infinite Jest a couple summers ago, but I've been following with some interest the Infinite Summer project, in which a bunch of people read this gargantuan novel together and try to make sense of it on a blog. Their reading schedule is somewhere around page 450 right now. I was looking back at some notes I took while reading the novel, and I found that at around this point, I made a big list of themes, keywords, motifs, etc., that I'd noticed in the novel so far. Some are pretty obvious, but I notice that even now the list is somewhat helpful to me in recalling the book and reviewing it mentally. Here it is:

Themes, Keywords, Motifs, &c. (@ pg. 450)

maps

dependence/independence

the truth of cliches

obsessions

America

fathers and sons

farts

turds

secrets

film (why cartridges? ammo ref?)

suicide

psychiatrists

parody

ephebes

deformities

convexities/concavities

teeth

tattoos

mothers

cages

buildings and bodies

Boston

Arizona

grammar and usage

[sic]

waste

entertainment

freedom

terrorism

ambition

class

slapstick/gonzo

stasis

advertising

corporate history

academia

booze/drugs/sugar/nicotine

sports

masks

spiders

irony

infinity

masturbation

urban legends

shadows

halation

cardioids

copia (a basic rhetorical method for this book (see 172-76 and 200-04)

Marlon Brando

Bob Hope

April (Fools Day)

November

Depend Adult Undergarment

Glad (Trash Bag?)

annular

interdependence

blacks/whites

skin problems

argot

masculinity/femininity

A Possible Family Tree

From Steven Augustine's very enjoyable essay about Nicholson Baker and The Mezzanine: 

An impertinent sketch of a possible family tree might put Joyce as a great uncle, Nabokov as grandfather, Updike as dad and Baker as eldest son, insofar as we may trace Updike, in his apprenticeship, to pathologically-descriptive mentor Nabokov, and Baker, in turn, to Updike via Baker’s admiration for Updike’s Nabokovian attributes...

David Foster Wallace’s “trademark” footnote-mania as on display in Infinite Jest is sometimes (though Baker is by far the less-famous of the two writers) reckoned as a steal from Baker (The Mezzanine preceding Infinite Jest by about a decade), but neither writer invented the use of footnotes in fiction. It isn’t hard, though, to imagine Wallace reading The Mezzanine and wishing he’d written it, or thinking to himself that he could do better by bringing an epic, humanist plot to the formal (and possibly elitist) apparent barrenness of Baker’s twee-but-envy-seedingly original work. It’s not a stretch to see Wallace as the tragic little brother to Baker’s eldest son in this genealogy of a lacquered intensity of style.

On DFW's Work

This piece by Jon Baskin in The Point Magazine is maybe the best thing on David Foster Wallace's work that I've read since his death. It's definitely the best reading of Infinite Jest. 

Here's what might be considered the nut of the essay:

By depicting various figures attempting to argue their way out of fraudulence, Wallace brings his readers to what might be a depressing realization: “true authenticity” can always be forged. His writing has value, specifically for us, because it actualizes and confirms our suspicion that, across the categories of American culture—in social life, television, politics, art and criticism—our obsession with fraudulence and authenticity has acquired the configuration of neurosis. The more fervently we demand authentic expression, the less capable we are of identifying it. We can no longer agree on standards, or whether we should have standards. Postmodernism has not succeeded in eradicating the distinction between what is real and what is fake, but it may have deprived us of any vocabulary for speaking meaningfully about that distinction. Irony, satire and ridicule, masked as coping mechanisms, become the ongoing symptoms and restatements of our condition. Wallace draws a line from the Frankfurt School to the metafictionists to The Simpsons to The Daily Show. He drives us to acknowledge the AA maxim that not just our worst, but also our “Best Thinking” got us here, where we are free to say anything but what we mean.

I also thought this was an interesting remark, especially since I'm preparing to read Tolstoy's Anna Karenina this summer:

Wallace was often accused of fashionable postmodern pretension, which inverts his potential vulnerability. Critics could more accurately fault Wallace for the kind of reactionary dogmatism associated with the late Tolstoy, whose turn to folk Christianity had a similar structure and motivation as Wallace’s valorization of AA.

DFW: The Mix

Over at Readerville, they're discussing a cool idea, the "short story mixtape." The idea is that you run off a collection of stories you like and give it to a friend, in the same way that you might make a mix tape (or, in latter days, a CD). 

I posted a comment, wherein I proposed a David Foster Wallace mixtape, five-sixths of which I actually did give to a friend recently:

"Good People"

"Good Old Neon"

"The Depressed Person"

"Forever Overhead"

"Octet"

"My Appearance"

What would your short story mixtape include?

A Bigger Fan

This is nothing new (it's almost two years old), but it is a nice little anecdote about David Foster Wallace's personal kindness. Rebecca Curtis, in the midst of a piece about the excellence of George Saunders's "Sea Oak," tells a story about writing DFW in January 2007 to ask him to provide a blurb for her book (incidentally, what chutzpah!):

Eight months ago, I wrote a letter to David Foster Wallace, on the thin premise that he teaches at my alma mater, in an attempt to get him to blurb my book. I was desperate. My publishers had hinted that if I didn't get a blurb soon, I was cooked. They'd sent me a list of writers, all of whose work I loathed, and urged me to contact them, praise them, and beg for blurbs. I felt I must keep my dignity. So I deleted the email with the list, and told my publishers I'd sent long letters to the writers but they never wrote back. Wallace (whose fiction is fabulous) is notoriously reclusive, and does not respond to missives. I wrote and swore to never demean him by going on about how much I like his work. Instead, I said that George Saunders, who'd been my teacher in the MFA program at Syracuse, is a fan. I said George teaches his stories, and mentioned a few remarks George makes when teaching them. Wallace answered that week (no blurb). He said, "I am 47,000,000 times a bigger fan of Saunders than he of me—trust me on this."

DFW and Depression

Max also answers a question about Wallace's depression:

I think of Wallace’s depression as so intense that living, let alone writing, would have been impossible without treatment. As he described it, it had no component of sadness or wistfulness or affectlessness. It was more like an excruciating physical pain, a buzz saw cutting through his body again and again. Who could write under these conditions? In another era I think he would have been called “possessed.” All the same his condition was diagnosed—and I never entirely understood the diagnosis—as depression. And the drugs he took ameliorated but did not completely remove the symptoms, and they added problems of their own. So will he now be classed as one of those writers, like Virginia Woolf, who battled depression and whose work can be partially understood with reference to it? Perhaps, though I think the novelist Jonathan Franzen made a good comment at the memorial service at N.Y.U. when he said that people who thought Wallace died of a chemical imbalance didn’t need the sorts of stories Wallace wrote.

I think Max is right about Wallace's characterization of his depression. It reminds me of the brilliant and harrowing passage in Infinite Jest about Kate Gompert and her definition of clinical depression (pages 692-98). I've used this passage in class while teaching Kathleen Finneran's The Tender Land, as a way of understanding what suicidal depression might look like, and of encouraging students to sympathize with those who suffer from it. The part I most remember from it is the comparison it suggests to understand suicide: the depressed person who kills herself has not lost the fear of death. It's just that the pain of depression is even greater than the fear of death—as someone trapped in a burning building is more afraid of burning to death than of leaping to death.

And yet I find Franzen's remark unhelpfully judgmental. What does he mean, really? 

To see Wallace's death as a result of a chemical imbalance is, in a sense, a compassionate view, isn't it? And also, in a sense, accurate? In the Kate Gompert passage, one man suffers from clinical depression after he slips on his basement floor and conks his head. Clearly there's some kind of physiological component of depression. And understanding it as a disease that is significantly independent of the will seems like a way of avoiding blaming the depressed person for her suffering, doesn't it?

DFW: A Traditional Composer in the Twelve-Tone Era?

D. T. Max answers readers' questions about his piece on David Foster Wallace. As part of his response to a question about whether DFW's work will be studied in classrooms in the future, Max throws out this remarkable speculation: 

the vast shift of creative effort from paper to the Web may render the fact that some good novels were written during our time irrelevant. Wallace and others like him may be the equivalent of traditional classical composers in the twelve-tone era.

This seems extreme to me. Has there really been that vast a shift? Aren't books still being published at an incredible rate? Granted, a lot of great stuff is available on the web, but most of the best stuff is still tied to paper publications. And how much of the work that is online only is of comparable quality to stuff published in the traditional manner?