On David Foster Wallace and Idolizing Suicide

A Fellow of Infinite Jest, of Most Excellent Fancy

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says "Morning, boys. How's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes "What the hell is water?"

-David Foster Wallace, in a commencement speech he gave at Kenyon College in 2005

As I watch an interview with David Foster Wallace for German television from 2003, I am most struck by a stretch of time that was cut out of the TV interview. A camera guy comes forward to adjust the set because Wallace has been moving in and out of the frame.

“God, sorry,” Wallace says, and the fervency of the apology is totally unwarranted by the mundane situation. “I move in and out?” He asks with deep concern.

They explain that yes, he’s been moving around a lot, and the background isn’t pretty so they’re having trouble. And then there’s this unbelievably touching moment where Wallace’s eyes cast down. The camera zooms in on his face as he quietly says, “I’m sorry.”

He says it in a tone of total sincerity, of shame and regret. He isn’t apologizing for moving in and out of the frame. He’s apologizing for his existence, for being who he is.

An off-screen producer then speaks. I assume he’s a producer because he has that slick, schmoozing quality about his voice. I picture him short but with a classically handsome face, waxed eyebrows and hair that is never out of place, even in wind. He tells Wallace it’s okay. “You’re pontificating,” he says, thinking it’s a compliment.

For the briefest moment, you can see Wallace wince like he’s in pain, before he smiles with obvious effort and says, “Thank you, there’s a nice word.”

The producer then says, “Which is completely screwing me.” He’s trying to be funny, not mean, but Wallace looks obviously pained. He’s hanging his head, and he looks like he might cry. Hurriedly, the producer continues to say, “I’m kidding, but you’re very…”

“Twitchy,” Wallace supplies, looking up.

The scene I'm describing happens around the 9:30 mark

Idolizing Suicide

There are several reasons that this interaction is so heartbreaking. It’s a crystallized moment that encapsulates the very theme that he wrote about most often, the theme that obviously plagued his mind: the clash between intellectual introspection and self expression, and the mass-market consumerism of American popular culture.

There’s something about suicides who are beloved by the lost souls of American society. Kurt Cobain said before he died that suicide is not an act, but a tale of the soul. Similarly, Wallace made frequent references to suicide in his interviews in relation to himself, usually either explaining how he’s managed to still be alive or justifying his existence.

Combing through these interviews, it’s hard to believe that people were surprised by his suicide. In hindsight, it’s preposterously obvious that suicide would be his end. He gave so much of himself to us, the people that loved him from afar, who would all have done anything for him but didn’t have the access required to drop a casserole by when he wasn’t feeling up to cooking. Elliott Smith falls into this same camp. The intellectual misfits, the people prone to depression because they are so vulnerable to the pervasive vapidity of American life, almost universally love these three men.

Postmodern: No One Knows What It Means

Wallace has often been put into the camp of ‘postmodernism’, but he balked at this a bit. In his mind, he had been influenced by postmodernist writers such as Thomas Pynchon, but considered himself more of a product of the movement than a part of it. He said that postmodernism was the first fully self-conscious era in literature. It was the first generation that read criticism of their writing widely, the first time that fiction seemed aware of itself as fiction, aware of the reader and aware of the presence of the author as a part of the experience of reading.

As Wallace did in all areas of his work, he took what existed in postmodernism and expanded it into new territory. Where postmodernism was rebellious, cynical and and aimed to shock, Wallace was romantic and sincere. His prose is at turns almost Gothic, but peppered by constant references to popular culture. Wallace was an avid devourer of movies and the popular culture he criticized. He was not, then, an outsider looking down on popular culture, but a consumer questioning the health of effects of what he’s ingesting.

If postmodernism was the first totally self-conscious movement, Wallace’s school, which is quickly becoming as definitive a term as 'Lynchian', moves beyond this. He defined the term in an essay on director David Lynch, "David Lynch Keeps His Head", and it has come to define the mix of the surrealistic macabre and the totally banal:

Ted Bundy wasn't particularly Lynchian, but good old Jeffrey Dahmer, with his victims' various anatomies neatly separated and stored in his fridge alongside his chocolate milk and Shedd Spread, was thoroughgoingly Lynchian. A recent homicide in Boston, in which the deacon of a South Shore church reportedly gave chase to a vehicle that bad cut him off, forced the car off the road, and shot the driver with a highpowered crossbow, was borderline Lynchian. A Rotary luncheon where everybody's got a comb-over and a polyester sport coat and is eating bland Rotarian chicken and exchanging Republican platitudes with heartfelt sincerity and yet all are either amputees or neurologically damaged or both would be more Lynchian than not. A hideously bloody street fight over an insult would be a Lynchian street fight if and only if the insultee punctuates every kick and blow with an injunction not to say fucking anything if you can't say something fucking nice.

Wallace was unbelievably available. Not only did he read criticsm of his work, he talked in interviews about how it made him feel. He wrote for Harper’s, Esquire and Premier, journalistic pieces about topics as diverse as cruise ships and growing up in the Midwest. Many of these are collected in a book called A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again. Wallace exists as more than author. He gave so many fantastic interviews that his conversational social commentary is a body of work all its own. You can see him talk about topics as diverse as 9/11, David Lynch, the Clint Eastwood western Unforgiven (1992), Generation X, and the future of fiction. You can read his works, you can read its criticism, and you can watch his response. This goes beyond simple self-consciousness. It’s a new phenomenon that I don’t think there’s a word for.

I posted a weird thing on this blog a few days ago re-imagining my life with a soundtrack built into it. It’s a short story, really, but every scene has a song put to it which is embedded in a playlist at the top of the page. There are pictures in it as well from my childhood to ground the surreal re-telling of my life. This was very exciting for me because it seemed to expand on what Wallace had started. With the cyber-medium you can make your writing an entirely immersive and interactive experience. A written story can have a soundtrack. This is amazingly exciting. J.K. Rowling is also at the forefront of this phenomenon with her definition-defying Pottermore.com. You can explore illustrated pictures of the Harry Potter chapters, play games that mirror various parts of her novels and discover new writing. Is this the future of fiction?

If you want to take the time to watch his interviews and read all of his words, you will know Wallace better than you know yourself. On top of this, he was also a creative writing teacher and you can find his syllabus online. You can read his teaching philosophy in the syllabus and his reading lists, which are wildly imaginative and surprising. Typical of his feeling of fraudulence and illegitimacy, he urges students to drop the course.

We can all be students of Wallace in an unprecedented way. This is made even more microcosmic by the fact that this is exactly the phenomenon that interested him most. He was interested in the evolution of middle-class America and what role mass media and popular culture played in our lives.

If You’re Not Going Hungry, Are You Allowed To Be Sad?

There is a self-conscious terror that comes with growing up in suburban America, like if you have three meals a day and a plasma TV you aren’t allowed to use up any of the suffering that the world has to distribute. It’s like there’s a limit to it, and the suffering should belong to the babies with flies on their faces, to the eastern children being sold into the sex trade in a city called Bangkok. For god’s sake, the city’s name is an inappropriate joke that we’re too politically correct to make. This is the infinite jest.

In suburban America, you don’t worry about where your next meal will come from. Instead, we struggle with meaninglessness. If we don’t have to struggle to survive, if we completely suppress the parts of us that are animalistic in nature, what is left over? Given the leisurely ability to pursue these sorts of questions, Middle America has evolved into a corporation-infested, hedonistic society constantly hankering after the sexy, new entertainment that will distract us from our lack of purpose. It’s terrifying, and it terrified Wallace particularly.

 

Worshipping Idols

We make idols of these genius suicides because they’ve made martyrs of themselves, although I think I know enough of David Foster Wallace’s character to know that he would do that weird twitchy grimace if he knew I was saying this.  I listen to his “This is Water” speech when I feel lost and it makes me cry. It makes me feel like I’m being really looked at, like I don’t need words any more because he’s already said the things that I’m trying to express in the way I drive my life. Ultimately, he was defeated by the banality he observed and railed against and watching his speech fills me with a sense of loss because Wallace isn't walking the Earth anymore.

So what then can we lost souls take from the fact that our idols lost this battle? Is there something perverse in idolizing and taking guidance from figures that didn’t defeat the beast? Should we see Wallace’s relentless pursuit of truth as a sacrifice made on our behalf? And if we do, what do we do with that salvation? Is it wrong that the words I’m using to describe David Foster Wallace and Elliott Smith are the same words that Christians use to describe the crucifixion?

A theme that repeats itself in Wallace’s interviews and writing is that of worship. He pointed out that addiction comes from the Latin word for religious devotion, addicere. In ‘This Is Water’, he says that the freedom an education offers us is the ability to choose what to focus on. In traffic when a Hummer cuts you off, instead of thinking about how it’s the conservative assholes of the world that drive gas-guzzling monstrosities, we can wonder if that person was in a traumatic car accident and if their therapist urged them to drive a vehicle that made them feel safe. We can choose how to frame our experience, and Wallace argues that it is in the most banal moments where this framing is the most important.

What do you think about when you’re cleaning the bathroom? Where does your mind wander when you’re driving down the same road to work for the 1,789th time? Worship money, he said, and there is never enough. Worship intelligence, and you will feel like a fraud. Worship beauty, and you will feel ugly. What becomes of us, though, if we worship suicides: the chauvinistic, drunkard Hemingway; the painfully pure but heroin-addicted Elliott Smith; the chronically depressed and self-deprecating David Foster Wallace? What rot in our soul does that start?

The Infinite Jest

Let me see. (takes the skull) Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio, a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy. He hath borne me on his back a thousand times, and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is! My gorge rises at it. Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. —Where be your gibes now? Your gambols? Your songs? Your flashes of merriment that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one now to mock your own grinning? Quite chapfallen? Now get you to my lady’s chamber and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favor she must come. Make her laugh at that. Hamlet, Act V Scene 1, Lines 178-190

A fellow of infinite jest, now a skull. Make her laugh at that. Infinite Jest, Wallace's masterwork, is largely concerned with this same battle of worship, and all of the characters worship the wrong things. Wallace also grew obviously frustrated in interviews when people referred to Infinite Jest as funny. He said many times that he set out to write a sad book.

The book was polarizing. People either worshipped Wallace or despised him. Wallace said that often times the good reviews liked the book for what he thought were the wrong reasons (such as because it was funny). He struggled with being an object of idolatry because he felt like a fraud. I wonder what he would make of the evolution of the ever-growing pedestal on which he now sits on in unchanging stillness.

I think people often found Wallace funny when he was sad. He was a victim of the infinite jest and of the desire people have to find humor in everything instead of just sitting with sad things. During his ‘This Is Water’ speech, an illustrating tirade he goes on to show the kind of toxic thinking he was trying to warn against gets a huge laugh from the audience. Throughout this part of his speech, the audience has been interrupting him with laughter as he grows more and more impassioned, finally cheering and whistling so loudly that he has to pause.

“This is supposed to an example of how not to think,” he says to the audience, who were clearly cheering in support of the very kind of thinking his beautiful speech is fighting.  Rather than being chagrined, they laugh again.

You can hear the frustration in his voice. Or maybe I’m just attributing frustration to it because that’s how I feel. Either way, I think Wallace felt deeply misunderstood. I think he wrote a thousand page book with 200+ pages of footnotes and felt that people still managed to misconstrue his philosophies because of interactions he had just like this: people laughing at the wrong time, cheering at the bad things, thinking Infinite Jest is funny, producers schmoozily telling him he’s pontificating. How very ironic that a writer who has made me feel so profoundly understood felt so misconstrued in his own life. It just isn’t fair.

I have a feeling that he would be truly horrified if he knew that people were worshipping him because he was humble to the point of self-deprecation. Repeatedly in “This Is Water” he tells the audience of graduates that he is not the wise older fish here to tell them what water is. He isn’t trying to tell you how to live your life. But I think he was deluding himself. He is telling us how to live our lives, and he did a damn good job of it, too. Maybe it’s okay to worship his words if what ultimately defeated him wasn’t a misinterpretation of truth, but was rather the simple inability to fully realize his profound understanding in his own life. Maybe he just became a self-fulfilling prophecy. We’ll never know exactly what he was thinking when he killed himself. One thing I do know though is that “he hath borne me on his back a thousand times.”

Charlie Rose interview in which Wallace talks about most of what I've touched on