
The Rewriting of David Foster Wallace - samclemens
http://www.vulture.com/2015/06/rewriting-of-david-foster-wallace.html
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RodericDay
_A large part of Wallace’s appeal, for me anyway, was that you could always
tell that he was kind of an asshole, ever on the verge of being cruel, and not
just to himself. Banishing contempt entirely may be a good way to live, but
it’s another kind of death for writing. Which is one reason it’s worth
remembering, as the image of Wallace as slacker saint and liberal sage hardens
into Hemingwayesque concrete, that he was a Reagan voter and a Perot
supporter; a jealous guy who once contemplated buying a gun to knock off a
woman’s husband; and a person who put to paper both the notion that the “good
thing” about 9 /11 was that it brought Americans together, and that “AIDS’s
gift to us lies in its loud reminder that there’s nothing casual about sex at
all.” Wallace never wanted that piece republished in a collection — in fact,
he wanted it forgotten. He’d probably be the last person to argue for his own
sainthood._

This is the DFW that always has jumped out starkly clear to me from the pages,
ever since I hit on the "Yours Truly" chapters in IJ. People who try to spin
him as some trans-human wise sage of universalism seem to me like the people
who see Jesus in toast.

He was an excellent writer, and he hit numerous home runs ("How Tracy Austin
Broke My Heart" resonates with me particularly). However, I still think he
would've been better if he developed less bland stances than his "apolitical
but vaguely pro-status quo" fare. His romanticizing of the goodness of "Middle
America", as in "The View from Ms. Thompson's" (about 9/11), is probably him
at his worst.

~~~
djur
I had a similar experience. People had really pumped him up for me, and yet
essay after essay left me either cold or disgusted. As someone who has
struggled with lifelong depression, I still didn't recognize anything familiar
in his description of watching hours of television a day, and I couldn't agree
less with his moralizing attacks on irony. And his piece on prescriptivism vs.
descriptivism is basically nonsense.

But it was the 9/11 essay that made me give up on him. Not just its stunning
lack of insight as to what America's reaction to the attacks was and would
lead to, although that was bad enough. But there's this point where he
mentions that the people he was staying with didn't know where various
buildings in NY were in relation to the Twin Towers; he explicitly describes
his hosts' ignorance of the layout of the NYC financial district as a sign of
their parochialism and isolation. What amazes me is that the eternally self-
reflective Wallace apparently never considered that the vast majority of
Americans, parochial and cosmopolitan alike, never have had any reason to know
anything about the layout of the NYC financial district. In that moment the
parochial viewpoint was _his_.

DFW was a fine stylist and made the occasional apt observation, but the man
doesn't even begin to live up to the myth. The best thing I can say about him
is that he would have been the first to admit that, too.

~~~
cjf4
The Midwestern-NYC ignorance was a minor part of a minor work, but have you
ventured into his fiction? Despite the caricature/myth he's turned into, you
don't get to that point without delivering the goods, and Infinite Jest
certainly did.

Stylistically it's an achievement, but moreover it had some pretty concrete
and incredibly relevant things to say about modern life's alienation and
addictions and the need for raw, earnest, emotional connections with other
people.

------
tptacek
_In a 2011 New Yorker essay, Franzen named Wallace’s relationship to his own
fame as the central battle of his adult life. He also gave voice to more than
one “interpretation” of Wallace’s death that most journalists have been
careful to avoid and many others probably found unseemly, that Wallace “had
died of boredom and in despair about his future novels”; that his suicide
“took the person away from us,” his loved ones, “and made him into a very
public legend”; and that he had therefore, in hanging himself, “chosen the
adulation of strangers over the love of the people closest to him.” Franzen
said it might well have been “suicide as career move” — the “Kurt Cobain
route.”_

Based on firsthand accounts of what Wallace suffered, this seems like an
irresponsible account of his death to run unqualified --- though it fits with
the rest of the one-note cynicism that runs through the article.

Wallace had a life-long struggle with clinical depression, and was
hospitalized in his 20s. He was for years on a regimen of Nardil, a third-line
medication for treatment-resistant depression. The major depressive episode
that preceded his suicide appears to have been triggered by an effort to wean
himself off the drug.

Mental illness is a real thing. Just as Steve Jobs cancer didn't make him a
martyr to tech and Keith Haring's AIDS didn't make him a martyr to art,
succumbing to clinical depression doesn't make Wallace "Kurt Cobain" or his
death a "career move".

The whole article bugs me, with its shrill hipsterism, a literary version of
Courtney Love's "REM's important work was done before they signed to IRS". On
a limb: I think the article itself is doing the same thing it accuses the
world of doing by rewriting any sincerity out of the stuff people like about
Wallace's writing. This despite the fact that in addition to being by all
accounts kind of a dick, Wallace was also apparently just a "treacly" kind of
dude, as the essays he wrote in Normal, IL indicate.

~~~
Cushman
Maybe it's just me -- and I never met the man -- but I've never had someone
convince me they understood what it's like to be terminally depressed as
completely as the writing of DFW. It boggles my mind that someone could miss
or misbelieve that.

The way that "This is Water" speech/pamphlet is brought up in particular
horrifies me. Hindsight granted, it's always read to me as someone who, stuck
in a deep, dark hole for so long, has given up on finding a way out. Blaming
himself for being there in the first place. Standing so _close_ to an answer,
but unable to see it. And we know how the story ends.

It's a feeling I know well, and I'm routinely shocked how people without (I
assume) first-hand experience with depression can completely ignore the
darkness there, and see something banal or even encouraging.

~~~
tptacek
I don't love the Kenyan College address as much as a lot of people do, but the
idea that it's treacle, or a depressive's accounting of the tribulations of
going to a grocery store (and one wonders: how can it be both?) seems like
horseshit. To me, it seems like a pretty straightforward recapitulation of the
ideas behind cognitive behavioral therapy, which Wallace probably had more
than a passing familiarity with.

~~~
Cushman
To answer your rhetorical: It can be both because depression makes boring
things terrifying in a way non-depressed people find boring again. _shrug_

Anyway, I don't want to go too deeply into this, so I'll just say you're
actually not far off from what I'm saying. What saddens me about "This is
Water" is the fact that it's _so close_ to something that might have been
really helpful to him. He's talking about these daily experiences, and
noticing how he's feeling. He feels _bad_. That's good; feeling bad helps.

And what he thinks next is... You have a choice of how to feel. Think about
everyone who feels even worse. You can decide what you care about. Don't think
of an elephant.

That isn't CBT, nor anything therapeutic-- that's depression, at its most
pernicious and deadly.

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kjdal2001
I’m not a fan of the tone of this article, at least the first half or so. Its
got something of a “if you hadn’t read Infinite Jest before Wallace died then
you aren’t a true fan” vibe to it.

Is it really such a terrible thing that people who hadn’t heard about DFW
while he was alive are seeing and enjoying his This Is Water speech? I think
it does a good job of describing how easy it is to fall into a pattern of
letting the world around you control how you feel on a minute-to-minute basis.
Yeah he ties the whole idea up too neatly, but it’s a commencement speech not
a long form essay.

Sure, there are probably plenty of people out there putting DFW up on a
“tortured artist too brilliant for this world” pedestal. But I think the
author isn’t giving people enough credit to assume that is the only reason for
his recent popular appeal. Maybe people stumbled upon the This Is Water video,
watched it, and it inspired them to think a bit differently about their own
thought process and feelings.

You don’t need to have consumed everything an artist has produced to be
inspired by one of them.

------
danielrakh
Here's an amazing commencement speech by David. Definitely worth a listen.
[https://soundcloud.com/cloudroutine/this-is-water-david-
fost...](https://soundcloud.com/cloudroutine/this-is-water-david-foster)

~~~
swordswinger12
Did you even read the article before posting that?

~~~
evmar
My stomach sank at reading the GP comment, to have missed the exact point the
article was making. (I almost wonder if it was intentional?)

But then somehow it is so appropriate to DFW that an article about him
becoming a caricature of a writer and bemoaning that speech in particular
produced that particular comment, a sort of circular irony or something that I
almost imagine he'd appreciate.

~~~
firstworldman
Actually kind of a meta-parody about the idea that no one's actually read IJ.

