R.I.P. D.F.W.

Novelist and teacher David Foster Wallace was found dead by hanging on Friday, September 14, 2008. He was 46.

The last time I wrote a literary obit on here was for Norman Mailer, and there one could speak of a long life, a long career, one felt one had grounds for summing up. In Wallace's case, such assessments seem somehow premature. Certainly, he accomplished enough to be notable, a challenge and an inspiration to many young writers. His two novels, The Broom of the System (1987) and Infinite Jest (1996) are funny, fascinating and, especially Jest, infuriating at times. Wallace possessed a mind unlike anyone who was currently writing, and his story collections and non-fiction feature writing have earned him many enthusiastic readers. Jest earned him a MacArthur "genius grant" in 1997, and he was, by reports, a beloved, admired, and engaging teacher at, first, Illinois State, and, until now, Pomona College. Wallace was a truly gifted and brilliant individual, but he also placed himself on "suicide watch" around the time his career began to take off and seems to have experienced extreme depression at times.

American letters has far too many notable suicides: Hart Crane, John Berryman, Sylvia Plath, Ernest Hemingway, Hunter Thompson, to name only a few. Besides the sense of loss -- in terms of talent and presence -- that such deaths provoke, there is always a kind of wonder: how could such talent, such success, come to such an end? We ask this because we want to believe that talent is its own reward -- something to live for -- and that success brings other rewards worth living for. And we seem to sense that somehow, if such talented individuals choose to cash it in early, we, our society, has failed them, and that it also fails to show us what the problem is.

I'm certainly not one who favors "life at all costs," and I suppose I can imagine some sort of psychic blow or emotional loss that would condone a feeling of oblivion as the best solution. But Berryman, for one, who wrote poem after poem trying to understand his father's suicide, shows how we always come up short trying to fathom death as a deliberate act. Schopenhauer, Dostoevsky's Kirilov, Albert Camus notwithstanding, suicide, while it can have an intellectual purpose, even, perhaps, an existential challenge contained within it, always arrives as "giving up." Giving up belief in change, at least, if not belief in some higher purpose. But also belief in the other people who are a part of one's life. Suicide is, perhaps, personal, private, solitary, but, if so, it asserts that solitariness over every tangible tie to life. That, I think, is what makes suicide a challenge to those who live on. Though we know that our means to defeat death are limited and will, ultimately, fail for each one of us, we seem to think that only truly inevitable death is acceptable -- that accidents and suicides and other surprising forms of death, "could have been prevented." Maybe so. But maybe we can only take what the gifted give us, for as long as they give it, until "something" gives out.

David Foster Wallace was a writer who loved facts and figures, so here are a few, from "suicide.org" (numbers are only for the U.S.):

1.3% of all deaths are from suicide.
On average, one suicide occurs every 17 minutes.
Suicide is the eighth leading cause of death for males.
73% of all suicide deaths are white males.
The suicide rate is highest in the western region of the U.S. and lowest in the northeastern region.
The suicide rate has decreased from the 1950-1980 rate of 13.2 to the present rate of about 11.

And who by fire, who by water,
Who in the sunshine, who in the night time,
Who by high ordeal, who by common trial,
Who in your merry, merry month of May,
Who by very slow decay,
And who shall I say is calling?

And who in her lonely slip, who by barbiturate,
Who in these realms of love, who by something blunt,
And who by avalanche, who by powder,
Who for his greed, who for his hunger,
And who shall I say is calling?

And who by grave assent, who by accident,
Who in solitude, who in this mirror,
Who by his lady's command, who by his own hand,
Who in mortal chains, who in power,
And who shall I say is calling?
--Leonard Cohen, "Who By Fire" (1974)

A SUPPOSEDLY FUN THING I'LL NEVER DO AGAIN

is read David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest (1996). I've just finished reading it, once. And that's enough. I can imagine re-reading parts of it, for there are parts of it that are, as they say, tour de force. But even so. I feel that returning even just a little bit might make me like any of the many addicts in the novel: just looking for an excuse for full re-immersion, and life is much too short. I still like to imagine I have things to live for, and this Entertainment isn't one of them.

As IF says: "concentrating intently on anything is very hard work." It's not that reading IF is hard work, it's simply incredibly extended work. "Following it," as in determining events' sequence and what is happening in "the story," requires preternatural powers of attention, sure. Though, as with any entertainment -- particularly if narcotics are applied -- following the story might not be the point. Granted, the time-frame of anything that happens is more knocked-out-of-kilter than in any novel I can think of. It follows gleefully in the "unreadable" tradition of Gravity's Rainbow (in that the logic of lucid drugged states is definitive for some of it and the enjoyment of quizzical scenes and odd flights of fancy for their own sake is accepted) and of Gaddis (in its penchant for ad infinitum monologue and dialogue and infinitesimal descriptions of scenes in which details dropped elliptically are somehow made to add up).

IF offers us many capsule comments on what reading it is like (most ostensibly aimed at the work of "après-garde" filmmaker James Incandenza). My favorite is: "'Watching Grass Grow While Being Hit Repeatedly Over the Head With a Blunt Object: Fragmentation and Stasis in James O. Incandenza's Widower, Fun with Teeth, Zero-Gravity Tea Ceremony, and Pre-Nuptial Agreement of Heaven and Hell,' Art Cartridge Quarterly, vol. III, nos. 1-3, Year of the Perdue Wonderchicken." But then I'll take this one too: "is the puzzlement and then boredom and then impatience and then excruciation and then near-rage aroused in the film's audience by the static repetitive final 1/3 of the film aroused for some theoretical-aesthetic end, or is Himself [the filmmaker; here, the author] simply an amazingly shitty editor of his own stuff?"

Actually that rhetorical question runs in the wrong direction: it's not that Incandenza (or DFW) is a "shitty editor" because that would presuppose some failed attempt to edit so as to produce less puzzlement, boredom, impatience, excruciation and near-rage, but I suspect in JOI and in DFW no such intent. Rather the question is: does it have theoretical-aesthetic import (sure, it does, of course, what else) or is Himself simply a monstrosity of mind-boggling self-involved proportions with no sense of limitations -- in other words, is DFW, like JOI, borderline demented most of the time? Probably not.

DFW (as narrator) seems intent upon nothing so much as producing in the erstwhile audience (those who can't look away, poor fools) puzzlement, boredom, impatience, excruciation, and near-rage. That the latter effect is in fact the theoretical-aesthetic end. With also the intent to provoke some related reactions such as: laughter (I laughed aloud, a few times), disbelief (driving with a dog tied to your car?), mild horror (most of the AA speeches), uneasiness (child abuse), excitement (though DFW's narrator tends to describe scenes of action in such a way that one thinks of trying to watch an important moment of decisive action on screen in a movie theater while the projectionist makes shadow-puppets on the screen), curiosity (provokingly unsatisfied, often), suspense (the latter tends to lead to near-rage since it is provoked by playing a scene out interminably until it finally seems ready to reveal something and then immediately stopping the scene so as to jumpcut to something bearing no relation to the scene in which suspense was evoked, thus stimulating a constant state of suspended action, which many of the characters live in anyway, one way or another), pathos, sympathy, and wisdom-recognition, even.

It's a staggering achievement in its way. I mean, I refer to Dave Eggar's memoir as "A Staggering Work of Mind-Numbing Tedium," but Eggar's a piker compared to DFW. DFW may be the closest thing to a Beckettian sensibility produced on these shores, but... Maybe it's just because good old Sam B. broke down all those narrative assumptions way back in the '50s when things were still existential, but my take on the Trilogy is that it's much more metaphysical, aimed at something generally called "the human condition." DFW's target seems to be "the American condition," which, granted, may include all humanity, especially in the sense of pharmacology and video über alles, but even so, the diagnosis remains in the purview of endless navel-gazing. Gately's stint in the hospital bed is Beckett-like but remains the consciousness of Gately who is suffering from being Gately, not just from Being. And the novel rips off its most effective "image" -- Mme. Psychosis as the Angel of Death -- from Bob Fosse's All That Jazz (though the latter film does get a credit line -- elsewhere, Fun With Teeth steals from an early '80s film called Reuben, Reuben, without a credit).

Or let's take James Albrecht Lockley Struck, Jr's response to a tedious-beyond-belief account (which we get to read too) of Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents: "Struck at certain points imagines himself gathering his [the writer's] lapels together with one hand and savagely and repeatedly slapping him with the other -- forehand, backhand, forehand." Amen, the very image I occasionally contemplated with regard to Himself, DFW. Or like totally demapping the guy to put him out of his angoisse du discours incessant.

BIG BOOKS, FEW BLOGS

It seems that undertaking to read rather lengthy books -- David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest and Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day -- serves to cut-down on my interest in day-to-day occasions for commentary. If it weren't for my idea of cataloguing albums of four different years month by month I'd have nothing to write about. This situation is exacerbated by a recently begun "book" (ok, so far it's more like a 1/4 of a chapter) on TP's output that, if I manage to stay on point, could be the project to overcome my critical-academic writing block. Too soon to tell.

I'm halfway through Infinite Jest and, since I'm also reading TP and thinking about his work and writing about V., a point of comparison with Pynchon occurs to me. Pynchon is a nerd who, thanks to the '60s and drugs and cool friends like Richard Fariña and living in Mexico, etc., became cool -- of course, the child being father to the man, much of his nerdiness remained in play, but it got channeled into this incredible prose writer. Kind of like Proust -- sure, he was a dilettante and a dandy and a neurotic but somehow he managed to put those qualities, generally drawbacks, at the service of fascinating prose and the story of how a dilettante became the great novelist of the era.

I'm less convinced that DFW has converted his nerdiness into the stuff of greatness. The guy is a nerd with a vengeance. From now on when I hear the phrase "Revenge of the Nerds" I'm going to think of David Foster Wallace. Particularly as they say that writing well is the best revenge. There's segment after segment (and the novel is really a collection of segments) that reads to me like revenge-via-verbiage.

DFW's a cool nerd, but that doesn't help. He reminds me of guys I knew in HS who would get stoned and do calculus problems. The nerdiness is only intensified by the substances. What this means in effect is that there's no process of selection and discernment going on. His sense of detail reminds me of a scene in Wonder Boys where a student tries to caution her teacher, a respected writer, about his endless opus, mentioning how the characters' dental records and the horses' genealogies might be overdoing it. I think DFW was the model for that aspect of the character.

The point of Infinite Jest seems to be to go on ad infinitum. If a scene can last for 5 pages, why not let it last for 10? Why not footnote every drug reference with complete pharmacological details? Why not obsess about competitive tennis in every possible permutation of nerdy obsessed athlete psychology? Oh, so that might be a bit elitist? I mean, how relevant do we find competitive tennis? So let's find something more accessible. What about AA meetings? Let's render the varieties of substance abuse in all their variegated detail ... and then return to it again. Then more tennis. Then more recovering addicts. Ever wonder how many kinds of physical disfigurement there are? Betcha I can use them all in a paragraph, or six.

And then there's the anal retentive complexity of the sentences and vocabulary, usually an end in itself, but occasionally a cop-out, as when a new AA recruit delivers an appalling tale of how she delivered a stillborn partial child while smoking crack. Well, that tale might be unbearable if she were allowed to tell it herself, so our narrator chooses to render it in his usual zonked-out but oh so articulate and hyper-verbal manner, so instead of an instant of abyss-like bathos and pathos (which we're told it was for all her listeners) it becomes a kind of voyeuristic "take" on human misery and stupidity, a bit too calculated in its effects. When Pynchon does this sort of thing, it quickly moves toward camp, sometimes chilling camp, but, though I detect some camp here, what comes across more tellingly in DFW's performance is the dressing-up for literary effect.

What DFW is incredibly good at is rendering what I can only call the "processed speak" of our time. The way information access permits everyone to speak like walking 'droids with media-ized prose instantly beamed into their brains. And the relentless language of diagnosis -- whether physical, mental, political, economic, you name it -- as the means by which we understand that we don't understand what's wrong. He can also render demotic speech remarkably well, when he chooses to. And he's also got down that flinty mastery of the non sequiturs of conversation -- especially deliberate non sequiturs between people who are dodging each other as in two brothers, Orin and Hal, on the phone -- that I associate with DeLillo. DFW, though, is rarely as funny (to me) as DeLillo and forget even getting close to TP.

TP tests limits too, but they're imaginative limits. In Pynchon, the detail with which unbelievable or highly fanciful things happen is unparalleled. And the tendency to make a literal fact become a metaphor or to let a metaphor take on a life of its own can make TP frustrating for those who want to know what's "really" happening, but otherwise you can just go along for the wild ride. DFW's imagination, having set up the basic scenario of the world of his novel, seems to be bent on simply replicating endless riffs on that scenario. I've read about 520 pages and I can't say the story is going forward, nor that any of the characters will surprise me. If there is a story unfolding (occasionally we're teased with the notion of one, sorta), it's seemingly more important to impede it with more segments than it is to tell it.

Remember in Ulysses when Bloom goes to the sink and turns the tap and the question is posed, Did it flow? And the answer gives us the specifics on where the water comes from. Or when the question is posed, what did Bloom, water-lover, admire about water? And the answer takes over a page of dense prose to render all the loveable qualities of water. That's what huge sections of this novel read like. Though rarely do I find myself admiring the prose the way I love the sound of that water passage in Joyce.

Oh well. As Beckett always sez: I can't go on I'll go on.