IT BECOMES A LANGUAGE

Eulogy for DFW

It feels insane to live in a world where David Foster Wallace does not exist. It feels like the world of Infinite Jest, during the Year of Glad, with wheelchair assassins prowling around Enfield Academy. The day before DFW killed himself, a woman who wants to hold one of the highest offices in the land repeatedly shrieked to an interviewer that she would not hesitate to use force against Iran if we found out they had nuclear weapons. She declared she would not even blink. She seemed to have been dropped straight of one of DFW’s hysterical-realist farces, IJ or a story from Girl With Curious Hair.

The fact is that you can take any current touchstone, from global warming to the stock market to the election, and tie it back into something DFW wrote. This was his genius: grand, all-encompassing, all details interconnected on a scale that linked the most pitifully small human experience to what it represented in eternity. His imagination could almost hold the world itself. He was one of the very few people that make me proud to be an American and a writer, and now that he’s gone, I don’t even think we realize what we’ve lost.

One must assume from his example that it is not desirable to be a genius. On first hearing of his death, after getting the howling¹ fantods, I felt totally fucked – if the most accomplished writer in the country does not desire to live, what the fuck are the rest of us doing? I assumed the reason for his suicide had to do with his intelligence: he had worked through Borges’ Library of Babel and was just off in some extremely obscure corner by himself, a weird and rarefied place, isolated in his extreme graphomania. He had – has – no peer, as far as I am concerned. None. Watch him on Charlie Rose, interviewed with Franzen and some guy named Mark Leyden – the two others are just strolling through a forest and grabbing low-hanging fruit, while Wallace is creating entire continents of ideas. Thank god, I did get to see him in person once, in San Francisco, interviewing Rick Moody. What Moody said I don’t remember at all; what I remember was DFW, whose most cursory remarks were far more interesting than Moody’s answers.

In fact the interviews were almost² as important as the stories themselves. ³ If you read all the books, which I did (and now almost wish I hadn’t, because there won’t be any more ever), you could sense an artist’s career arc taking shape, and the interviews fleshed all that out in detail. DFW never had to claim that impossibly corny adolescent dream of “being a writer” – he discovered at Amherst that he was bored with modal logic (something I feel smart even being able to name) and sought another subject that made his mind “click”. His literary journey was one that began with intellectualism for its own sake, and progressed to the empathetic and omniscient prose of a real giant. He grew into the part, and he expanded the premise of fiction itself in the process. His role in pushing American literature forward is impossible to overstate.

I certainly don’t expect to encounter any other writer in my lifetime who will exert such a tidal force on my own work. As is the case for many writers, there is a time before I read him, and a time after. His works at first drew me in because they so amazingly mapped out my head – never, ever had I seen someone write words that so resembled my thoughts. (I don’t mean that the writing itself resembled my thoughts – I’m not that smart – but the characters and the way they behaved, controlled by their neuroses, did.) As I read further I eventually became convinced that DFW was actually an embodiment of the zeitgeist – he was the modern condition: buried in layers of awareness served all too well by a media-drenched society, shaped and raised by individualism and irony but very much aware that the only really fulfilling part of being human is simple, embarrassing empathy. I became obsessed with fiction as an empathetic device. Because my two obsessions, neuroses and empathy, make up the poles of his work, there is very little possibility that anything I produce will be free of his influence.

David Foster Wallace had – has – a place in my head. It’s reached the point when an influence stops becoming an external force working on you and takes up residence, starts producing original thoughts. There is the DFW part of my brain, that has generally merged with the literary/anxiety-driven one. It’s now inseparable. Every literary brain is I think just an amalgam of whatever was fed into it, but DFW is like its own lobe. The great thing about reading him was that he had already mapped the territory and so if he started out talking about anxiety, which was already up my alley, and then linked that to something he had figured out – the infinite regress of self-consciousness, to name one crucial example – I could just follow his fiction to actually find out what it was I wanted to know, long before I knew I wanted to know it. Part of the writing process is searching for that which brings out a natural fascination in you, and with DFW it was one-stop shopping. I could follow him from self-consciousness to depression, to irony and detachment, to finally that meltdown phase and then recognizing that I needed other human beings. He wrote the experiential, episodic side and then included detailed notes on how this related to epistemology. He had such a grasp of diverse fields of knowledge, and not only that, but why they were useful – philosophy and logic are just models of the human brain’s way of attacking the confusion of existence, math just a way to express haunting concepts like infinity, linguistics a tool to expose the paradoxes inherent in living as a being that is both subject and object. As far as connecting knowledge to lived experience, what I consider one of fiction’s most fantastic capabilities, he was the ultimate.

The day David Foster Wallace killed himself, I finished a four-page story about a guy who wants to kill himself but doesn’t know how to tell his girlfriend.⁴ The problem with the story was that it kept ending up like a DFW imitation. The main character was a modern dude with an office job who has trouble communicating and worries about how he appears to other people, and at the same time is aware that he’s a cliché, and is anguished by this. I kept thinking, I have been way too influenced by ‘Good Old Neon’, I cannot write this thing. To be honest, I was starting to wonder if I could write anything that didn’t sound like a DFW imitation. But the real reason I couldn’t write it is because I had no clue what kind of pain you’d have to be going through, to be in such a situation.

I hope no one ever sees that story, ever. It looks pathetic and cute compared to what DFW was likely feeling and suffering through. Arranging details so that it gave the right impression – just a few degrees from cliché, using the right metaphors, etc – seems insane and ridiculous right now. In short, fiction writing is for the moment just sad, the way I look at high-level chess playing, limited and childish. But it is Wallace-esque, I propose, that on the day of his death I was writing another, highly diluted version of a situation thematically similar to his and examining it with anxiety because I felt the anxiety of the narrator was not fictionally honest enough, was only a silly fraudulent attempt to please some abstract literary judge. There’s some kind of annular structure in that. Proof that his fiction was based on reality, of the stranger and more intangible sort.

I’m sure that many of us will be struck with a certain deadening feeling of futility after realizing that this master of modernity is no longer with us. Why write? Who do we want to impress? We wanted to impress him, that was the whole game. He was the arbiter. It also feels like, paradoxically (and he would love that), hearing of the death of someone you happened to know only through words is so painful that this feeling itself is beyond linguistic description. Read ‘Octet’, read Broom of the System, read anything – this was a man who knew the limits of language. How can we express the grief of knowing that this person we loved so much went through so much pain?⁵

For those of us who wish he had left a note: read ‘Good Old Neon’, one of the best things ever written in the English language. Where, in the original story, we had a main character who turned out to be imagined by the story’s author in a metafictional twist that sought to explore the possibility of empathy, we now have a document where we the reader can see what our author thought, through a character, on the subject of suicide – the structure turns inside out. You can literally read DFW telling a fictional version of himself what death feels like. I doubt you will be able to get through the whole thing without weeping. Or for more spooky foreshadowing just read certain passages of Infinite Jest. Was he that good at research, that he could sit in at a couple of AA meetings and write all that about daily life at a halfway home? Well? Does it seem possible? No, it doesn’t. We didn’t get it, just how much he ID’ed. The name of his short story collection, Oblivion, will never strike us the same again.

In the years to come the facts will add up again and again, and other ones might emerge – he had been hospitalized for depression over the summer and undergone electroshock therapy – and clues will float up in the stream of words he uttered during interviews. The books will gain a dimension of meaning just as a Hemingway or Thompson book does, but it will miss the point. Death wasn’t the point; empathy was the point.⁶ Death was the annoying person at the party who keeps trying to shift the subject onto himself. Empathy was the silent hero of works that were, paradoxically, entrenched in sarcasm and irony. For DFW, one led to the other. When he wrote, in ‘E Unibus Pluram,’ that the next literary rebels would be the ones to shun irony and embrace single-entendre principles, he struck me as a little bit like a proud but slightly thwarted dad who’s watching his kids succeed. He wasn’t going to be the acting leader, it was too late for him. But he’d found the way out, and he’d started digging a tunnel for the rest of us.







¹ Literally.

² Almost? Comparing two extremely high-quality things is difficult.

³ Also, the way he appeared physically in these interviews, the ones that were televised, was a thing to behold – he’d make a point and then do a split-second wince, as though he were waiting for some hand to reach down and strike him for being so incredibly smart. Truly one of the most beautiful tics I have ever seen.

⁴ I really did, I am not like fudging dates to make this more poetic or something.

⁵ The fact is that the problem was not related to DFW’s stunning intelligence but rather other basic programming. Depression is a mental illness and cannot be overcome simply by having a fun hobby. There were so many humorous essays, we thought DFW was well-adjusted, had gone through all the tough times most humans do and was able to write about them. Little did we realize that he was probably writing about them right from the center of his pain.

⁶ Which is precisely why those of us who actually did have something like a creative addiction to Wallace’s work should refrain from making complaints that now we are deprived (which we are, that’s undeniable), and just consider how much pain he must have been in. Just consider it. If you can’t imagine, read the books – you would be fulfilling what DFW saw as fiction’s ultimate redemptive purpose, allowing one person to experience another’s suffering. Unfortunately, in this case it happens to be that of the author, Himself.