David Foster Wallace: 1962-2008

When J, having discovered the news in yesterday's New York Times, told me that David Foster Wallace committed suicide on Friday, I found myself shuddering in disbelief. The only previous occasion upon which I have reacted viscerally to the death of an artist -- one whom I'd known through his or her work exclusively -- was when Mary Hansen, longtime vocalist for the band Stereolab, was killed tragically in an accident at the age of 36. It took me a little while -- and some red wine, and some wallowing sessions to the tune of Stereolab's Emperor Tomato Ketchup -- to get over my anger with the bastards for that one.

Wallace, like Hansen, was an artist whose work has at times affirmed my desire to go on living. I passed through a couple of periods as a young man during which Wallace's stories and novels -- especially Infinite Jest -- performed the lofty task of confirming for me the existence of human life somewhere outside of my apartment. Or maybe confirming the existence of human life somewhere in my skull. I don't know; something like that. I'm not a writer the way Wallace was -- I write songs well, but paragraphs and stuff don't come naturally to me --, and that's not just in the sense that Wallace was obviously a genius and I'm not. It's in the sense that it always seemed that he kept 'craft' at arm's length. I don't know whether this is true, or if it was maybe an impression that he cultivated; I'm not sure it makes much of a difference.

Maybe it was that Wallace was trying to and sometimes succeeding at rising above 'craft'. Maybe it was that he was uncomfortable with 'craft' and needed continually to diffuse its pretensions, embed jokes somewhere in the bricks and mortar of his sometimes elaborate, nonlinear plot structures. (Structures which have been described as resembling everything from Möbius strips to parabolas.) I always had this sense that in some of his best and worst work, he was really just trying to find ways of pulling back the Wizard-of-Oz-ian curtain and saying, "Hi; how's it going? The world's profoundly fucked, don't you think? Yeah, me too."


Wallace declared in interviews his interest in devising strategies by which to appropriate the irony and subversive politics of postmodern smart-asses like Pynchon, but to fashion from this raw material a kind of fiction that could be evocative of the human experience (if not necessarily linear), morally engaged and emotionally resonant. And as Wallace's early novella Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way makes clear, he wasn't interested in building metafictive roller coaster rides in the style of of John Barth, a tiresome and wanky strategy that probably still found favor with Wallace's creative writing MFA faculty, whom he derided as square and as obsessed with a notion of form as an ideal in its antiseptic self.

Wallace seemed to be struggling in his fiction to find ways of coping with life, or at least to document and annotate real and hypothetical attempts to cope with life. Another way of saying whatever it is I'm trying to get at is that he seemed as a writer to be always on the lookout for ways of curing his loneliness, our loneliness. From what little I actually know about him as a person, he was someone who was always struggling with depression and various forms of anxiety. The publication and critical success of a novel he had written as an undergraduate lavished upon him a level of attention that's not all that healthy for a young man to receive, and he become involved with hard drugs, which he kicked apparently with the help of Narcotics Anonymous (although, it seems just as likely that he attended these NA meetings as research for his second and final novel Infinite Jest, one of whose narrative threads involves drug addition and NA). In an essay 'E Unibus Pluram', Wallace describes in some detail that his problem with television is that it's so damn entertaining that it's hard for him to stop watching. He addressed this issue by living without a working television set in his house, apart from a small one with a built-in VCR and no reception, on which he would watch weekly episodes of Ally McBeal, taped for him by friends. Furthermore, he lacked Internet access from his home computer and therefore routinely carried his work on a floppy disk to a computer in different building in order to email it to his editor.

In a way, it's strange that his death affects me as it does, given that I have almost nothing in common with Wallace as a human being, and he probably wasn't the kind of person I'd take to hanging out with. He was reportedly a genius at doing certain kinds of obscenely complicated logical proofs: basically, somewhere in the gray area between mathematics and philosophy; a zone in which the material is so difficult, so beyond my grasp and attention span that I find it most practical simply to prefer Continental philosophy. He was born into one of those well-connected, WASPy families -- of which most of us are equal parts jealous and resentful -- with old-school academic parents, in which things like proper grammar and etymology were spoon-fed to him and his siblings in the form of parlor games. It sounds like a textbook example of a family whose hypereducated brats are as likely to end up having a nervous breakdown as they are to ascend to the heights of some academic or professional field.

Wallace did both. Perhaps as a consequence of being told repeatedly that he was a boy-genius, he developed what I guess you could call a smart-kid rebellious streak, characterized in part by virtuoso displays of sarcasm and wordy arrogance. The difference between his rebellious streak and those of most arrogant, WASPy professor's sons, is that, from all appearances, Wallace had a reverence for and understanding of mischief, an art that is all-too-often bungled by children/young adults of privilege and cultural savvy, who tend to be dilettantish and noncommittal when it comes to most forms of fun. If you want to do it the right way, there's an ethics to being a rebellious kid; you have certain responsibilities to those around you. It's like those gay indie-rock bands that act 'cute' and 'ironic', as if no one's ever done that before; as if everyone doesn't know that they're still a bunch of asshole frat boys. It has to do with whether you are giving something back to your audience of greater substance than simply the opportunity to live vicariously through you.

I'm surmising that Wallace understood and revered mischief on the basis both of interviews and of some of the more rollicking and madcap episodes in his two novels, Infinite Jest and The Broom of the System. I've never seen anyone comment on this, but it occurs to me that in both of these novels, particularly the former, Wallace's depictions of adolescence, undergraduate life, and young adulthood are singularly evocative. Depictions that are not exactly 'realistic' so much as hyper-real, fractured and faithful to the task of capturing the sharpness of focus with which young people see adults for the self-serving hypocrites that they are, part and parcel of which is the ability of young people to police the hypocrisies of their peers, to play fair and to insist upon fair play. This insistence upon fairness, this willingness to cut one's fellow down to size for his benefit, this anarchistic, decentered anti-system of justice that protects friendship from meaninglessness: is this not what we're describing when we use the word mischief?

I now know something that I've suspected for a while now: that I'm never going to get to read a third David Foster Wallace novel. I hadn't been all that interested in his newer stories and essays; he seemed to have gotten himself locked into a kind of holding pattern: the same plodding, technical-manual diction; long declarative sentences; a character's memories narrated in a past perfect tense monotone; a faint tint of themes and allusions, conjured through a delicate threading-together of textures, colors and half-formed thoughts -- a skill at which Wallace's virtuosity is matched in contemporary story-telling only by that of David Lynch --, the results of which could still give you the chills, but the technique for which was becoming sadly predictable, and even tedious. Some of the stuff in Consider the Lobster and Oblivion was great, of course. But I remember thinking that maybe I had moved on a bit from Wallace, or maybe he was perilously close to repeating himself, or maybe the warmth, energy and humor that I had found in Girl With Curious Hair and Brief Interviews With Hideous Men and his novels was beginning to elude his writerly grasp. The final possibility, at least, would now appear to have been confirmed in spades.

"Wallace was one of the ones who made it." That's how J put it yesterday as we were trying to pin down why the news of his death -- and the nature of his death -- packed such a seismic punch. "He was one of the ones who made it," she said, "but apparently, it didn't seem that way to him." It was more assuring and life affirming than we realize, I think, to know that David Foster Wallace was out there. It meant that one of the good ones made it. And yet, having gotten there, he was still struggling with such pain and such despair that it had become unendurable. We have lost an important ally in the fight against the charlatans and the liars. God damn, Dave, we're going to miss you.

He was 46 years old.

I grew up during the Reagan Administration.That's not the reason to elect Barack Obama, but we should elect him anyway.

...And I want to say something to the schoolchildren of America who were watching the live coverage of the shuttle's take-off. I know it's hard to understand, but sometimes painful things like this happen. It's all part of the process of exploration and discovery. It's all part of taking a chance and expanding man's horizons. The future doesn't belong to the fainthearted; it belongs to the brave. The Challenger crew was pulling us into the future, and we'll continue to follow them.

I've always had great faith in and respect for our space program. And what happened today does nothing to diminish it. We don't hide our space program. We don't keep secrets and cover things up. We do it all up front and in public. That's the way freedom is, and we wouldn't change it for a minute.

We'll continue our quest in space. There will be more shuttle flights and more shuttle crews and, yes, more volunteers, more civilians, more teachers in space. Nothing ends here; our hopes and our journeys continue...

-- Ronald Reagan, 'The Space Shuttle "Challenger" Tragedy Address',
televised on 28 January 1986.

I grew up during the Reagan Administration, followed by four years of George H.W. Bush, passing into my adolescence during the Bill Clinton years. For now, I want to ramble about the twelve years of Reagan/Bush, both the things about those years that I remember from having lived through them and the things I remember about them from having lived subsequent to them. We can talk about the Clinton years at another time (or maybe we just shouldn't talk about them ever!).

I. The world was flat.

It was a time, Dear Reader, of a mass-cultural FLATTENING, during which the consciousness (and conscience) each and every American was slowly but surely DUMBED-DOWN until he became a castaway on his own self-involved, lazy-brained isle of ostensible plenty. The expanding use of plastics in the creation and packaging of cheap consumer junk ushered in a new and more profitable era in planned obsolescence. It was the time during which the Cold War reached the apotheosis of its self-sustaining outlandishness: I'm referring, of course, to the 'Star Wars' missile defense initiative. (Which only ever existed on paper, in tax dollars, and in the meticulously-TelePrompted, content-bereft cadences of Reagan's slow-motion national addresses... Of course, Bush, Cheney, Condi and Co. are clamoring for Star Wars 2.0: 'DA RETURN!!'.)

It was a time of unthinking acquiescence to received wisdom; of consensus formed through every man, woman and child's desire to count himself among the espousers of the consensus-view, of bloated, diet-trend-chasing conventionally and of political and economic group-think. A time that found us aiming our frustrations, criticisms, guilt complexes, and intellectual energies inward; publicly, we adopted the hard-driving but collegial manner of an Atomized Individual Economic Actor after Milton Friedman's own heart. Foot-soldiers in the Reagan Revolution. Power suits. Gay Republicans. The ascendancy of identity politics in academe. Myopia, hypocrisy. Bedazzlement with the shiny gadgetry of Empire. The Magic of Spielberg™, and his big-budget authoritarian morality plays. Disney, and such cinematic achievements as Flight of the Navigator.

II. Politics of Bush/Cheney condones openly the undermining of the moral authority (and coherence) of the USA's democratic project.

But I'll allow that the era of Coke, Diet Coke, Caffeine-free Coke, Caffeine-free Diet Coke, Cherry Coke, New Coke and Coke Classic had something going for it that eight years of George W. Bush lacks. It pertains to W.'s style of governance (if we can call it either style or governance...), or rather, what it lacks. The Reagan years had as one of its pillars a public face that sought to be seen as serving the interests of the rule of law rather than setting the rule of law aside as bothersome or even naive. A set of communications-directives that took pains not simply to lie to the American people, but to tell all of the right lies. That took as a given the necessity of being seen not only to respect the United States Constitution, but to be seen as actively upholding it.

I know this might seem like a minor point -- after all, I'm talking only about rhetoric and propaganda -- but for me it's one of the most distressing things about our current situation. Sure, back in the 80's there was Iran Contra and a billion sketchy/criminal military adventures, but at least the bastards bothered to lie in such a way as to offer most credulous or self-preoccupied people in this country the psychological bulwark of plausible deniability. Joe Briefcase could go on believing sincerely that the values of the United States -- you know, as inscribed in the Constitution and especially the Bill of Rights? -- set the parameters of Executive Branch activity in -- at the very least -- its objective, tone and spirit.

That really does make a difference, because at least in those days, the racists and xenophobes from -- I don't mean to generalize, 'cause there are plenty of exceptions to this regional truism -- the South couldn't openly rally around the cause of preserving measures and policies that are essentially fascistic, both in their intent and in their means of execution. For instance, when it is revealed that the has CIA waterboarded a couple of people under the cloak of secrecy, that pisses me off now, and it would surely have pissed me off during the 80's and 90's. The sudden revelation that actual torture is being conducted by the United States would have caused much bigger shock waves among the ocean of citizens of the United States than this exact revelation -- except on a much greater scale -- has caused today. (Or, there'd have been at least a shock wave!)

3. Moral revulsion vs. despotic authoritarianism.

However, Reagan-era GOP politicians had a way of turning this very shock to their advantage by mircomanaging the nature and focus of the cognitive dissonance experienced by the public. When a credulous population becomes privy to knowledge that doesn't quite seem to be at home among the other things its government has said it has done or would do; when, the vast majority of broadcast- and written-news sources are hopelessly compliant, anodyne, condescending and middlebrow (everything from The CBS Evening News to Larry King to David Brooks), well, Sir, Joe America just goes ahead and brushes it off as an anomaly! Supposing that there had been some kind of exposé published in Harper's Magazine in, like 1985; most of us could -- and therefore, would -- surely convince ourselves -- subconsciously if not consciously -- that the sordid practice that had been unearthed represented a contemptible yet isolated practice, and that all of the requisite channels would surely be pursued in bringing its gang of perpetrators to justice (!).

To be sure, it of course wouldn't have been true that the practice was isolated, and I don't deny for a moment that there are unnerving harms that accrue from the kind of false consciousness that plausible deniability taps into. But, I have to say that by contrast, it is far more disturbing to witness, as we do today, rednecks -- both unreconstructed and in their exurban, Jesus-loving, middle-management-type Joe America incarnation -- rallying around the cause of actually justifying depraved, wicked, and -- I would honestly (and perhaps naively) have assumed throughout my entire life, heretofore -- Un-American practices.

What's shocking to witness is that in the current era of Bush/Cheney, when the veil is lifted from such an onslaught of depravity, cynicism and hypocrisy, the effect is (1) an upsurge in masochistic/patriotic fervor for despotism among lots of (although surely not all) uneducated people, and (2) one of little more than a widespread gross-out and disdain from onlookers who feel totally helpless to change the political and moral tide in the United States. Of course, I identify myself, for better or worse, as one of this second group of onlookers. I was raised, after all, in a nominally middle class (by which I mean upper-middle class) home during the Disneyland 80's. My sense of anguish and doom at the state of things in this country often reaches extremes of hopelessness, nausea and existential confusion.

So I and others who are disgusted by the things that are being revealed about our government, and about the Bush/Cheney Executive Branch in particular, are at this point just trying to cope with all of this evil and madness -- and I'm quite sure that our reaction is shared by the vast majority of people, which is not always the same thing as the vast majority of voters. And anyway, this group is fractured in so many ways, and politicians and advertisers are doing their best to keep our conception of our self-interest fractured (of which, more commentary soon [hint: a significant ray of hope that we can consolidate our power lies in the candidacy of Barack Obama]).

Meanwhile, we watch the first group -- a contingent of uneducated poor people from Alabama or wherever -- whose identification with militarism comes from its lack of access to life options other than either joining the military or working at Quickie-Mart, whose blood lust comes partly from ignorance (which could have been spared them if there were decent schools for them to attend), partly from sexual repression (which is deepened by the stranglehold of extreme, hyperconservative, evangelical quasi-Christianity), and partly from a deep class resentment, the true, economics-based nature of which US culture has taught it not to be able to identify, in favor of cultural resentment, liberation-consumerism, xenophobia and the taking of pride in one's own backwardness.

It's gross...

IV. Let's consolidate our political power to put an end to the USA's dalliances with despotism under Bush & Cheney.

I guess my thought is this: is there a way for people who feel as disgusted as I do to create political solidarity among the widest group of voters that I possibly can? I mean, I know anecdotally that there are plenty of people in the country, both my age, older and younger, who are equally upset about this stuff on an equally visceral, existential level. In other words, all of us who feel this way -- irrespective of what other political views of cultural values we hold in common, irrespective of whether we prefer going to cocktail parties or bible-study meetings -- feel it with passion and don't know exactly how to stop the unchecked, onward march of the immorality and self-destructiveness of the present political course of the United States.

V. Barack Obama's 8/28/08 speech begins successfully to consolidate support for rebuilding the USA's moral authority.

Well; as it happens, most of the preceding rant was written a few days before this post. But I think that we have a figure around whom we can rally support for rebuilding American moral authority, and saving the idea of democracy so that it can live to see another day. That figure is, of course, Barack Obama. And contrary to the unthinking and flippant commentary of rightwing hired goons like David Brooks (who used the term "underwhelmed" in his characteristically simple-minded reaction on PBS -- screw you, you fake moderate liar; you're nothing but Rush Limbaugh in a three piece suit...), Barack's speech last night was amazing.

What many commentators (Brooks included) seemed to miss was this: the point of having upwards of 80,000 people assembled at the speech was not because of the impact it would have on Obama's rhetoric; it's because of the reaction shots! Anybody who paid any attention could see that witnessing that many people -- a group that was genuinely and unmistabably diverse -- being moved to tears by their shared purpose, values, goals and sense of urgency sends a very powerful set of signals indeed to a very broad cross-section of the United States population.

I thought it was breathtaking. Here it is:

A dialogue and two aphorisms:Cable 'news' = MTV for senior citizens.

I. *
John Cage: Human beings need to dream, and to dream always.

Thrasymachus: But it's against company policy to dream.

JC: [momentary silence]... Human beings need to dream, and to dream always.

T: But my employer would have me fired were I to engage in this activity. And yet, you say that human beings need to dream always.

JC: As to the statement about your employer, I can only take your word for it. As to the matter of human beings dreaming, yes. Human beings need to dream always.

T: Would you have me fired from my job?

JC: I would no more have you fired from your job than I would have you receive a promotion and a raise in pay. I would no more have you receive a promotion and raise in pay than I would have you drink your coffee with two lumps of sugar, rather than your usual one lump, during your morning coffee break: the coffee break that you take in the large foyer outside your office, in which you sit facing the same direction as the Rauschenberg painting that hangs in the foyer of the adjoining house .


II.
There's no sense in despair. This isn't to say that there's no sense in your having been led to despair. Quite the opposite! It remains, however, that there's no sense in despair.


III.
Cable news -- all of it: CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, Whatever Else -- is not news. But don't hate it for what it's not. Hate it instead for what it is: MTV for Senior Citizens.



* These do not represent the words or ideas -- real or imagined -- of the late John Cage. They are instead wholly the creation of our blogger. Same = true as regards the portrayal of Thrasymachus.