David Foster Wallace Remembered

(I wrote some of this shortly after learned of Wallace's death, but didn't publish it because it seemed too much about me.  His kindness was in direct contrast to my arrogance—I needed to establish the latter before I could address the former—but it was still too focused on me.  It wasn't until I read bianca steele's comment and dan visel and Kathleen Fitzpatrick's remembrances that I found a way to frame this rambling non-story.)

Infinite Jest was published the second semester of my freshman year at LSU.  Every time I saw someone lugging it around, I’d approach them.  By the time I'd scaled half the novel, an informal reading group had created itself.  (This is, I think, one of the reason his death has had the effect it’s had—so many of his readers transferred some bit of the intimacy they felt, based on the investment required to read IJ, to other readers.)  This loose association of people who read Wallace, Pynchon, and Gaddis were the same people who’d be reading McSweeney’s, The Believer and n+1 a decade later.  Because Wallace first brought us together, I always assumed narcissism drove my belief that he was responsible for the birth of arch-sentimentality.  But I don't think it's narcissism.  Without Wallace, there would've been no David Eggers, no Marco Roth, no Joss Whedon. 

Kathleen's tribute includes a quotation from the closing paragraphs of "E Unibus Pluram" (1993):

[Mark] Leyner's work, the best image-fiction yet, is both amazing and forgettable, wonderful and oddly hollow. I'm finishing up by talking about it at length because, in its masterful reabsorption of the very features TV had absorbed from postmodern lit, it seems as of now the ultimate union of U.S. television and fiction. It seems also to limn the qualities of image-fiction itself in stark relief: the best stuff the subgenre's produced to date is hilarious, upsetting, sophisticated, and extremely shallow—and just plain doomed by its desire to ridicule a TV-culture whose ironic mockery of itself and all "outdated" value absorbs all ridicule. Leyner's attempt to "respond" to television via ironic genuflection is all too easily subsumed into the tired televisual ritual of mock worship.

Entirely possible that my plangent cries about the impossibility of rebelling against an aura that promotes and attenuates all rebellion says more about my residency inside that aura, my own lack of vision, than it does about any exhaustion of U.S. fiction's possibilities. The next real literary "rebels" in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of "anti-rebels," born oglers who dare to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse single-entendre values. Who treat old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and fatigue. These anti-rebels would be outdated, of course, before they even started. Too sincere. Clearly repressed. Backward, quaint, naive, anachronistic. Maybe that'll be the point, why they'll be the next real rebels. Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk things. Risk disapproval. The old postmodern insurgents risked the gasp and squeal: shock, disgust, outrage, censorship, accusations of socialism, anarchism, nihilism. The new rebels might be the ones willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the "How banal." Accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Credulity. Willingness to be suckered by a world of lurkers and starers who fear gaze and ridicule above imprisonment without law.

Look at the date.  How has television changed since 1993?  By embracing the single-entendre.  Consider Joyce Millman's initial response to Buffy:

Early on, "Buffy" was more obvious and jokey with its metaphors ("You're a 16-year-old girl who thinks her problems are the end of the world," Buffy's mom prattles).

Why did the show improve? Because Whedon mastered the art of writing characters who owned their entendres.  The line Millman complains about comes at the expense of Buffy's mother.  By the conclusion of the second season, those easy ironies had disappeared.  The backward, quaint, naive, anachronistic, banal, sentimental, melodramatic story of the boy who changed after sleeping with his girlfriend had been infused with the show's lore and become the stuff of Greek tragedy—while still always being about the boy who changed after sleeping with his girlfriend. 

The single-entendre.  (Not that this is how Whedon employed the term on the show itself.) The phrase that knows it means more but insists on meaning without winking.  The phrase that rages against the sighing of the bright.  In this respect, Buffy and Infinite Jest belong to the line of works too-clever-by-whole inaugurated by Ulysses: simple stories told the only way their simplicity could be understood by their audiences.  So eager are these folks to impress upon their peers the singular genius they possess, they write about a rabbinical interpretation of "ben Bloom Elijah" instead of focusing on the fact that "the Voice of Heaven" thrice orphans poor Leopold, son to a dead father, husband to a cheating wife, father to a dead son. 

Or they start a blog.

There's too much of me on the internet.  ("Three blogs is three too many," I've been told.)  But the first time I was on the internet was when someone told someone about a paper I'd written for Katherine Hayles's "Big Books" seminar way back in 2001—I didn't even have a blog then, much less three—and someone else asked me if they could put my seminar paper online where David Foster Wallace himself might read it.  Suffering from being insufferable—early grad arrogance is always ugly—I slapped it online and sent them a link.

Needless to say, "Demand and the Appearance of Freedom: The Role of Corporate Media in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest" wasn't any better than other items I'd written then, but there it is, forever on the internet.  (Because the folks who host it, while ostensibly on my team, refuse to share my password with me.)  I sometimes wonder whether the rationale behind—I mean, subtending—all my blogging is little more than a desire to shovel links atop a second-year seminar paper. 

But here's the rub:

My third year in grad school—shortly after Wallace had been awarded the Roy Edward Disney Chair in Creative Writing at Pomona—I went to hear him read.  When I made it to the signing table, my plan to quickly and quietly express my admiration for his work and shuffle off was engulfed by flames and pushed off a cliff by a white-hot need for intellectual validation.  In a little under three seconds, I'd rattled off the first nine paragraphs of my essay. 

When I paused to breathe he said he'd read it and, with a warmth I can't manage to convey, that I needed to keep thinking.  It reads like an insult, I know, but it sounded and felt like a declaration of camaraderie:

"We are the thinking people!  But for us there would be no thinking!  We must keep thinking!" 

I beamed.  He smiled and signed my copy of Infinite Jest. When I told this story to a friend of mine a few years later, she insisted one of us was lying.  Maybe he was.  Maybe what I witnessed was a testament to his pathological kindness.  My experience certainly accords with dan's: "I can't claim that I knew Wallace—I met him in passing at a book signing, where he was kind and more generous than he needed to be."  But I may have also caught of glimpse of what Kathleen describes:

His commitment to his students here was entirely composed of those single-entendre values, a determination to really know them, to treat them as actual people whose struggles were every bit as real as his own. But he also had the respect for them that led him to refuse them the easy way out, to forbid any laziness in their expression, to force them to wrestle with their sentences with the same ferocity that he did.

I got that from a 30-second conversation.  Better to think than be clever.  Better to work hard than rely on genius.  Better to struggle with the single-entendre than embrace empty-archness. 

Comments

[Vance Maverick]

On the one hand I don't get Wallace (or Buffy). A question of generation, no doubt -- though a few years younger than Dallas-Fort Worth by the calendar, I'm functionally of an earlier generation.

On the other, I do get you here. Much to his credit, and to yours. Thanks for this.

[JPool]

This is really sweet and interesting. There's more here for you to say here, and I get the sense that it could, in time, be developed further into a more complete something, but it's still quite touching and compelling as it is.

I remember the wave of talk about post-irony in the period following 9/11 and being unimpressed by it. As far as I could tell irony had been dying for several years already, and not generally in good ways (gestures that had a few years earlier been sly critiques slid into a sincere/false winking endorsements of uglyness -- In the Company of Men becomes "The Man Show"). Irony will, of course, always remain vital, even as its forms and uses shift. The work, however, that DFW and others did in finding new ways to deal in sincerity and directness without making it seem trite is something powerful and worth celebrating.

[iain]

"rages against the sighing of the bright"

Scott - that's really good. I'm stealing it.