David Foster Wallace Is Dead
I can't think of a writer who has consumed more of my friends' time---debating on the phone, lamenting/praising/giggling over those footnotes, completely digging his essays, wishing we had written those essays, getting lost in his short stories and novels---than David Foster Wallace.
News came that he apparently hanged himself on Friday night. This should be bigger news. I flicked on the cable and it's still news reporters hip high in hurricane water, Palin lies, and a WETA pledge drive.
I called the friend who not only finished Infinite Jest but I believe sometimes re-reads parts of it. He already knew. Three other friends had called.
I then dialed Utah to the literary pal in grad school, the one working on filling libraries with detailed stories about Altoona and heavy metal churches. He didn't know.
"Oh God."
"Shit."
He said something like that.
"Fuck."
"I can't believe it."
There just isn't a lot to say at the moment.
Wallace had a lot to say on everything from cruise ships to porno to a tennis great. Here's what he told Salon's Laura Miller about writing in a thoughtful interview:
"If you, the writer, succumb to the idea that the audience is too stupid, then there are two pitfalls. Number one is the avant-garde pitfall, where you have the idea that you're writing for other writers, so you don't worry about making yourself accessible or relevant. You worry about making it structurally and technically cutting edge: involuted in the right ways, making the appropriate intertextual references, making it look smart. Not really caring about whether you're communicating with a reader who cares something about that feeling in the stomach which is why we read. Then, the other end of it is very crass, cynical, commercial pieces of fiction that are done in a formulaic way -- essentially television on the page -- that manipulate the reader, that set out grotesquely simplified stuff in a childishly riveting way.
What's weird is that I see these two sides fight with each other and really they both come out of the same thing, which is a contempt for the reader, an idea that literature's current marginalization is the reader's fault. The project that's worth trying is to do stuff that has some of the richness and challenge and emotional and intellectual difficulty of avant-garde literary stuff, stuff that makes the reader confront things rather than ignore them, but to do that in such a way that it's also pleasurable to read. The reader feels like someone is talking to him rather than striking a number of poses.
Part of it has to do with living in an era when there's so much entertainment available, genuine entertainment, and figuring out how fiction is going to stake out its territory in that sort of era. You can try to confront what it is that makes fiction magical in a way that other kinds of art and entertainment aren't. And to figure out how fiction can engage a reader, much of whose sensibility has been formed by pop culture, without simply becoming more shit in the pop culture machine. It's unbelievably difficult and confusing and scary, but it's neat. There's so much mass commercial entertainment that's so good and so slick, this is something that I don't think any other generation has confronted. That's what it's like to be a writer now. I think it's the best time to be alive ever and it's probably the best time to be a writer. I'm not sure it's the easiest time."
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4:14 am
well...should i say something about a man who wrote a novel and an essay on "infinite" concept?
maybe he founded the infinite way.
And i also want to say that if i knew just a bit this man: he's right.
This is all i can think today, because i really miss him.
So long.
4:16 am
Very sad. I wonder if he was depressed over the election, especially in light of the McCain piece appearing in Consider the Lobster. Any grudging admiration he may have had in 2000 must have been totally disillusioned in the last few weeks.
7:55 am
What's Palin lying about?
8:01 am
Or could it be the classic depressed clown?
I think the entire thing is very weird, and a real shame too. We have so few really good writers left, it seems. Or, at least, we are past the time in which good young writers get published without a prior reputation.
10:16 am
I think he meant lies told about Palin.
I'm really bummed out about Wallace. Why would he kill himself?
10:22 am
It feels like the 911 of contemporary literature.
12:15 pm
i am sickened by this development.
literature has been deprived.
1:10 pm
I just received Neal Stephenson's "Anathem" yesterday I I began wondering when the next Wallace epic would arrive. Unless he left a MS behind, I guess it won't. What a shame to lose such talent.
4:21 pm
David Foster Wallace's commencement address at Kenyon College on May 5th, 2005 is the single most perceptive, empathetic and thoughtful piece on the human condition that I have ever read. As I understand it, humans view reality and base opinions on reality from vastly different prisms and understandably many (most actually) do not view reality nor base opinions on reality in a way that David did. Doesn't make anyone a better or worse person than anyone else. Nor is it a bad or good thing it is just a- "thing". But for those whose prism is similar to David's, the Kenyon College piece offers hope and brings us just a that much closer to whatever it is we are seeking. For me it brings me closer in that the collection of ideas within that speech comes closer to explaining the meaning of life than anything I have previously been presented. And for that, I am grateful beyond words. For those whose prism is different from David's, I hope that you have found or will find soon your "Kenyon College Speech". David was right, "this is water". David, I hope you can finally daydream. You deserve it.
4:30 pm
CLJ--Thank you for highlighting Wallace's commencement address. It's fantastic piece.
Readers can find it here:
http://www.marginalia.org/dfw_kenyon_commencement.html
9:24 am
Terrible news.
I read IJ, however I have to say I enjoyed his essays significantly more (maybe because I could actually finish them within a year). I think the essay format suited his writing style better (and I think that's why some of the more "self-contained" chapters or sections of IJ were so good [e.g. the second chapter on the guy waiting for pot, the section of the videophone, etc.])
There was something so moving about his essay on Roger Federer a couple years ago. The whole essay is actually about the arbitrariness of human potential. The central matter of the essay is a comparison of Federer and a child with cancer (and by implication, DFW himself) and the reconciliation in DFW's mind that "whatever deity, entity, energy, or random genetic flux produces sick children also produced Roger Federer, and just look at him down there. Look at that." Of course, DFW being DFW, this punchline, the whole point of the essay, is buried in a footnote that appears about three-quarters through the essay. If you skipped the footnotes, you'd think the essay was only about Federer, and not the sick child, or Wallace, or the rest of us.
Well I doubt I'm the first guy to say it, but whatever deity, entity, energy, or random genetic flux produces us vapid masses also produces David Foster Wallace., and just look at him down there. Look at that.