Tag: david foster wallace

Adam Kirsch on Reading David Foster Wallace

Matthew EilarLeave a comment

I’m still chugging along through Infinite Jest.

Adam Kirsch has written one monster review  in The New Republic of The Pale King, Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will, both by David Foster Wallace, and Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace, by David Lipsky.

It’s a meandering review, and while its conclusion is not particularly unusual (“One of the many things to mourn about Wallace’s death is that we will never get to know the writer he was striving to become.”), there are many intriguing observations along the way:

This argument is translated into fictional terms in the early story “My Appearance,” from Wallace’s collection The Girl with Curious Hair, which appeared in 1989. The story concerns a middle-aged, moderately successful TV actress who is making an appearance on David Letterman’s talk show. Her challenge is to find a way to communicate sincerely in the face of Letterman’s sneering irony, which to Wallace is the epitome of TV-bred cynicism. A friend tells her that the only way to cope is to out-Letterman Letterman: “Laugh in a way that’s somehow deadpan. Act as if you knew from birth that everything is clichéd and hyped and empty and absurd, and that that’s just where the fun is.”

Wallace dreads this kind of irony, which poisons communication and makes displays of emotion look ridiculous. He dreads it on civic grounds, of course; but he also sees cool knowingness as a deadly threat to his own literary genius, which is essentially sentimental and melodramatic. (“There’s never been a time in serious art more hostile to melodrama,” he complained to Lipsky.) That is why Wallace is exercised by the ironic self-consciousness of postmodern fiction, in much the same way that he is disturbed by David Letterman. Lost in the Funhouse can hardly be held responsible for “a great stasis and despair in U.S. culture”—for one thing, not enough people have read it. But in “Westward,” Wallace offers a novella-length attack on the metafictional gamesmanship of Barth’s story: “You want to get laid by somebody that keeps saying ‘Here I am, laying you?’ Yes? No? No. Sure you don’t. I sure don’t. It’s a cold tease. No heart. Cruel. A story ought to lead you to bed with both hands.”

In his hostility to pop-cultural irony, Wallace was (ironically, perhaps) in agreement with the best pop culture of his time. Many people have observed that Wallace’s trademark look—the bandana, lank hair, and stubble that appear in his author photos, and made him one of the most recognizable writers of his time—evoked the grunge style of Kurt Cobain, the lead singer of Nirvana, whose suicide in 1994 was a mythic moment for Generation X. When Lipsky, who was profiling Wallace for Rolling Stone, asked him the obligatory questions about his taste in music, he described Cobain’s songs as “absolutely incredible. But unbelievably painful. I mean if you, you know, all the stuff that I was groping in a sorta clumsy way to say about our generation? Cobain found, Cobain found incredibly powerful upsetting ways to say the same thing.”

The famous lyrics of “Smells Like Teen Spirit”—“I feel stupid and contagious/Here we are now, entertain us”—could be used as an epigraph to Wallace’s essay on television, and even more appropriately to Infinite Jest. Cobain’s sullen parody of alienation used irony to defeat irony, much as Wallace, in “Westward,” used metafiction to defeat metafiction. And the young novelists who followed in Wallace’s wake—Jonathan Safran Foer, Dave Eggers, and Zadie Smith, to name the most prominent—have shared his righteous refusal of irony. They believe that literature should be positive, constructive, civically engaged, a weapon against alienation. Jonathan Franzen, who was Wallace’s close friend and has staked repeated public claims to his legacy, told The Paris Review that the two of them shared a philosophy of fiction: “The point of agreement that he and I eventually reached was the notion of loneliness: that fiction is a particularly effective way for strangers to connect across time and distance.”

The review, of which this is only one small part, is well worth reading in full for anyone interested in Wallace’s fiction or interested in the themes that he explored in that fiction.

Infinite Jest IV

Matthew EilarLeave a comment

I realized that I was going to have to sacrifice my goal of blogging about each section as I read it to the larger goal of finishing the book this summer. I’m hoping to still check in with a post every week or so. This post covers through roughly page 86.

In this section of the book, I’m starting to get a little bit of a sense of a larger-scale plot. Just glimpses at the fringes: periodic reminders that the doctor is still paralyzed before the mysterious cartridge, the emergence of some character interactions, glimpses of a metafiction.

I’m also constantly awestruck by how many variables DFW juggles in delivering his story. Sometimes the struggle of really reading the texts prevents me from truly appreciating how ambitious a project it is. It’s not just the chronological games he plays, or the vocabulary, or the large stable of characters. It’s also that he’s writing in a variety of tones, modes of writing, degrees of formality and reality. He’s almost always funny and careful, but there’s a tremendous difference between the realism of, say, the Tiny Ewell introduction and the patent absurdity of Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents. It’s actually quite the trick, that he’s able to derive humor from both patent absurdity and from closely-observed detail.

Stray Observations:

  • The mysterious cartridge that traps viewers into watching it forever reminds me greatly of Ice-nine from Cat’s Cradle.
  • Inability to communicate continues to be a theme; the novel almost contains a taxonomy of the different ways that we can fail to be understood. The death of the Canadian official in his home contains many: he is attacked by his robbers because of language barrier, he cannot get help from the person that calls at the door because of the tape across his mouth, and he cannot get help from his wife because of distance.
  • I’m enjoying the flashes of metafiction that we get: we’ve had repeated and unrelated references to Toblerone and Byzantine erotica.

Infinite Jest: YDAU I

Matthew EilarLeave a comment

Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment I

Thinking back, he was sure he’d said whatever, which in retrospect worried him because it might have sounded as if he didn’t care at all, not at all, so little that it wouldn’t matter if she forgot to get it or call, and once he’d made the decision to have marijuana in his home one more time it mattered a lot. It mattered a lot.

In the same Charlie Rose interview I embedded in my last post, DFW is asked what he thinks about the reception and accolades that Infinite Jest was getting. He responded that he was surprised that so many people focused on how funny the book was. It seemed to me like Wallace was uncomfortable by people focusing on the humor of a book that really contained his heart and soul, like a mob laughing at a statement of truth.

If there are many more sections like this, I’m not sure that he had cause to worry. This section is both deeply funny and deeply dark. As it’s basically the stream-of-consciousness ramblings of an addict (repeating the mantra, “Where was the woman who said she’d come.”), it’s extremely closely observed, DFW leads us deep into oversharing territory. As a reader, I felt a strange and conflicting mixture of identification, reactionary disgust, and amusement. There are some of the narrator’s insecurities and coping mechanisms that feel so true, or that I experience to a different degree in my own life, that I can’t help but to identify with him. That feeling is counterbalanced by the part of me that can’t imagine living the way that the man does, in a world of self-delusion completely lacking in perspective. It goes beyond a voyeuristic disgust, I actually find it somewhat scary. And to top it off, it is also witty and funny.

Given what we know of DFW’s struggles with substance abuse and alcohol addiction, and the extensive self-help library he owned, I think it’s probably safe to say that some of the emotional and behavioral truths in this section contain some reflection of Wallace himself. And so you could easily see why he would be threatened by a public that seemed to not even acknowledge the true blackness of some of his writing. Like Hal, he knew the futility of the question, “So yo then man what’s your story?”

Stray Observations

  • In the quotation above, the narrator of the section shows that he too, like Hal, obsesses over the potential of language to betray communication.
  • Throughout the chapter, the narrator refers to a small insect, possibly a manifestation of his insanity (or addiction). One of the things that I love about it is that it pops up casually, like a non sequitur.
  • I imagine that DFW smoked some weed in his lifetime.
  • First appearance of a footnote.
  • Other potential DFW-ian character traits: a strange mixture of optimism and pessimism. A great amount of self-knowledge, coupled with a paralysis that prevents him from acting upon that knowledge.
  • The idea that perhaps the best way to treat a weakness by overindulging seems to be significant to the narrator on a personal level, and also perhaps apply to the broader culture. The way that the narrator treats weed and and entertainment are strongly linked: The moment he recognized what exactly was on one cartridge he had a strong anxious feeling that there was something more entertaining on another cartridge and that he was potentially missing it. He realized that he would have plenty of time to enjoy all the cartridges, and realized intellectually that the feeling of deprived panic over missing something made no sense.

New Vocabulary

  • Rapacious: aggressively greedy or grasping.

Infinite Jest: Part One

Matthew Eilar1 Comment

Year of Glad

The familiar panic at being misperceived is rising, and my chest bumps and thuds.

I am not what you see and hear.

There’s an amazing moment in the 1997 Charlie Rose interview that I’ve embedded above (transcript). Rose and David Foster Wallace have been chatting about academia and balancing writing with teaching, and Rose suggests that the reception of Infinite Jest has given Wallace the literary respect that he has been seeking. Wallace is visibly uncomfortable with that suggestion, and after ambivalently disagreeing for a couple of minutes, says “A lot of people hadn’t had time to read the book yet. So the stuff about me or interesting rumors that developed about the book and all that stuff getting attention — I found that — I didn’t like that very much just because I wanted people to write — to read the book. I’m sorry that I’m essentially stuttering.” To which Rose responds, ” No, you’re not. You’re doing just fine.”

That essential fear of communication, of desiring so much to express oneself to another while being paralyzed by the possibility of misunderstanding, is the central dynamic in this first section. The overwhelming horror that the three admissions officers have towards Hal’s personal statements are so over the top that the section becomes a darkly comic piece of absurdity. I think the episode in the interview shows that this “familiar panic at being misperceived” was something familiar to Wallace, and it’s hard for me not to read this section as Wallace’s personal nightmare. It also makes me think of my first times being under the influence of, say, alcohol. Because the self-control of intemperance was something new to me, I was paranoid that, even though the people I was with could hear and understand the words I was saying, nobody was understanding what I wanted to communicate. Social situations, especially new situations, give me some anxiety at being misunderstood, but it’s rare that it approaches the level described by Wallace through the eyes of Hal.

I think this section has some broad social implications as well. In the past couple of years, as internet communication has become more democratized, we’ve seen countless episodes that play out this conflict between communication and misunderstanding in public. Teenagers spreading embarrassing texts and pictures of each other. The ACORN video. Shirley Sherrod. NPR’s Vivian Schiller. Digging up politician’s college theses for provocative statements. And this has given rise to a whole industry trafficking in false communication speaking a false language. Politically incorrect public statements and emotionally neutral non-apologies. David Letterman interviewing Paris Hilton. Press releases apologizing for a star’s transgressions. We have more venues for wide-spread and instantaneous communication than ever before in human history. But with this freedom of communication comes a greater fear of one’s words being taken out of context. This can lead us to withdraw, to stop trying to communicate for fear of misunderstanding. At that moment, our more advanced communication tools actually impede true communication and human connection.

Stray Observations

  • Hal’s narration is clearly stylized and not-naturalistic. His vocabulary is absurdly tortured and his syntax convoluted (though probably grammatically correct). It throws off my perception of the character. Hal’s uncle is unquestionably presented as a buffoon, and yet all of that character’s linguistic tics (“And let me say if I may that Hal’s excited, excited to be invited for the third year running to the Invitational again, to be back here in a community he has real affection for, to visit with your alumni and coaching staff, to have already justified his high seed in this week’s not unstiff competition, to as they say still be in it without the fat woman in the Viking hat having sung, so to speak, but of course most of all to have a chance to meet you gentlemen and have a look at the facilities here.”) are also present, to a lesser degree, in Hal.
  • I’m going to interpret Hal’s annoying use of “de moi” to be a sign of pseudo- something.
  • I’m not sure how to take Hal’s characterization of the Director of Composition as “effeminate.” That word is almost always used as a pejorative, and frequently as code for gay. The effeminate academic cowering and jealous of the independent, masculine writer is a trope from Hemingway to Bukowski to Mailer. It just doesn’t seem to jibe with what I know of DFW.
  • At one point, Hal mentions that he thinks that Dennis Gabor is the Antichrist. Wikipedia tells me that Dennis Gabor was the inventor of hologram technology. This delights me to no end. Of couse Gabor would be the antichrist in a setting in which holographic transmissions are the dominant media form! It’s one of the early example of DFW world-building and differentiating the setting of his book from our own present.
  • Hal makes reference to a retired Venus Williams coming to watch his match the next day. Wikipedia sleuthing tells me that Williams was 16 at the time that Infinite Jest was published. That’s an impressive bit of prophecy on Wallace’s part.

new Vocabulary:

  • Wen: a boil or sebaceous cyst.
  • Kekuléan: refers to Friedrich August Kekulé von Stradonitz, the organic chemist who discovered the chemical structure of benzene. He supposedly came upon this structure after seeing a ouroboros, a snake eating its own tail.
  • Lapidary: a phrase engraved in stone or of suitable for engraving.
  • Presbyopia: farsightedness caused by loss of elasticity in the lens. Usually presents in middle age.
  • Parquet: wooden flooring made by geometrically arranged blocks.
  • Enfilade: a volley of gunfire directed in a straight line, end to end.
  • Espadrille: a light canvas shoe with a plaited fiber sole.
  • Martinet: a strict disciplinarian, especially in military context.
  • Etiology: the cause or set of causes of a disease or condition.

Infinite Jest 2011: Prologue

Matthew EilarLeave a comment

Infinite Jest is the first book that I’ve encountered that has its own reading conventions. In the same vein as someone introducing their friend to bringing props to a midnight screening of Rocky Horror, David Foster Wallace’s fans will tell you that if you plan on reading the book in print form, you’ll need two bookmarks (one for the endnotes). You might consider splitting the book in two, but if you do, make sure that you tape in the endnotes. Get post-it notes for quick reference to pages with vital information. For these and other reasons, beginning Infinite Jest seems more like starting a project than reading a book.

I have a tendency to rush to (and through) things. It can be an asset–it helps me to think quickly on my feet, and my ADD-like need for new information means that I learn new things throughout the course of my day–but it’s definitely something that I constantly need to be aware of and try to control. In its more negative incarnations, it means that I have a hard time finishing things, I don’t give myself enough time to fully work out thoughts, and I absorb knowledge and experience in a more superficial way. It’s my goal to really work through Infinite Jest, to take my time, to reflect. There’s a strange futility to writing about a work that so many others have written about–in the same medium, no less–but writing responses to a work as you read it is completely different than responding after finishing. You can’t help but to go down rabbit holes that lead nowhere. It also means that the constant assessment that the reader has of the author, the reader deciding whether and to what degree to trust the author, is done in public. In the interest of making this reading project as complete as possible, I want to talk about what I’m bringing to the table before starting reading.

The David Foster Wallace I know is not a fiction writer, to the extent that I know him at all. That is to say, I haven’t read his fiction, and what I know of him is really a pastiche of four almost unrelated people.

The first David Foster Wallace is not really a person, but a collection of achievements. I know that he was a nationally ranked tennis player while in high school. I know that he was tremendously intelligent. I know that he was one of those mythical people with intuitive knowledge of literature and human experience (he majored in English and had an amazing command of the literary canon) and mathematics and logic. I know that his undergraduate thesis became his first novel and was commercially published. I know that his command of philosophy was such that he contributed book reviews to scholarly publications. Yet this is also the man who covered politics for national publications and wrote a book on rap lyrics at the forefront of academic interest in rap as poetry.

The second David Foster Wallace is a journalist. I haven’t read many of his articles, but his voice as a writer is so distinctive that I immediately understood how this man could amass a cult. His articles are afire with honesty and subjectivity. Reading Wallace’s articles is like stepping into another person’s brain, understanding his experience as one’s own. But his articles are also full of restraint. The classic objection to subjective journalism is that the convention of writing with an objective, impersonal voice is that it allows (or perhaps forces) the writer to include all facts and information, even that which would contradict the narrative being constructed by the writer. It would be too much to say that Wallace refrains from constructing narratives, but his idiosyncratic footnotes and thought processes constantly undermine them. His casual mixture of the highbrow and the lowbrow–making reference to esoteric postmodern philosophy as easily as to television shows–has become the dominant tone of the internet, but there are few who have had such curiosity about popular culture and such comfort in the halls of academia.

The third David Foster Wallace is that encountered in interviews. A tangle of contradictions: laid back, intense, brilliant, unsure. The thing that strikes me about the interviews are the questions that he brings. The frustration that he has with American society and culture resonate deeply with me, and yet he always maintains a curiosity and measured optimism about the direction that the culture will go in. There’s something holy about him. I don’t mean to suggest that he’s somebody to be venerated, but there’s something refreshing about how much he truly cares about the issues that he raises.

This leads directly to the fourth David Foster Wallace, a dead man. Wallace’s suicide changes everything. Because of the questions he was preoccupied with, because of the way that he thought, knowing that his final choice was suicide colors my perception of his work in a way that is completely different than almost any other artist. Zadie Smith, in an essay published after his death (I’ve linked to it on my Infinite Jest page), writes movingly about Wallace’s preoccupation with humanity, why we think the way we do, why we behave the way we do, why we have ordered our lives in the way that we have done. These are his questions. His answer was suicide.

This is what I bring to the table. I’m looking forward to meeting another David Foster Wallace. I’m looking forward to reconciling that person with the others.