
“The Depressed Person” by David Foster Wallace (1998) [pdf] - bonefishgrill
http://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/HarpersMagazine-1998-01-0059425.pdf
======
fullshark
My understanding is that David Foster Wallace wrote this about Elizabeth
Wurtzel and it was meant to be a kind of slam of her as not being depressed
but merely narcissistic.

[http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/six-things-you-
didn...](http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/six-things-you-didnt-know-
about-david-foster-wallace-20120827)

There's probably a better source but that's the first one I found on google.

~~~
partinggroan
I have no idea what is the context of this or who this woman is, but
narcissism is a mental disorder as well so I'm not sure why anyone would try
to belittle someone for being narcissistic.

This whole "my disorder is better than your disorder" doesn't impress me,
neither does the universal adoration of DFW.

~~~
Bartweiss
The question is a bit more complicated than just belittling someone's
disorder.

Wurtzel wrote _Prozac Nation_ , which was nominally an account of her own
depression and a broader reflection what personal struggles with depression
look like in America. It was widely seen as revealing but unpleasantly self-
indulgent and unreflective of common experiences with depression.

That might clarify why DFW, struggling with depression himself, was rather
less than kind to Wurtzel and her book. Narcissism is something to sympathize
with, certainly, but seeing a popular book portray narcissism and a rather
entitled life as representative of depression put a lot of people's hackles
up. The context, and the move from "disorder" to "book about having a
different disorder", are vital.

None of which is a simple endorsement of DFW, but it's at least worthwhile
context for the piece.

------
hprotagonist
Every time I read "Infinite Jest", i wonder how much of it is basically
autobiographical with a thin veneer of difference and a heap of really, really
tight prose.

The recursive spiral of recursion is really hard to avoid with DFW to the
point you think it is the point, which, of course, is itself recursive.

~~~
lisper
I took a whack at IJ and got bogged down after ten pages or so. This is from
TDP, not IJ, but it's illustrative:

"And the depressed person always took care, when as an adult she attempted to
describe to a supportive friend the venomous struggle over the cost of her
orthodonture and that struggle's legacy of emotional pain for her, to concede
that it may well truly have appeared to each parent to have been, in fact, a
matter of "principle," though unfortunately not a "principle" that took into
account their daughter's feelings at receiving the emotional message that
scoring petty points off each other was more important to her parents than her
own maxillofacial health and thus constituted, if considered from a certain
perspective, a form of neglect or abandonment or even outright abuse, an abuse
clearly connected-here she nearly always inserted that her therapist concurred
with this assessment-to the bottomless, chronic adult despair she suffered
every day and felt hopelessly trapped in."

That was one sentence. There are many favorable adjectives one could
reasonably apply to it, but IMHO "tight" is not one of them.

(BTW, that sentence is not an isolated example. Here's the very next sentence:

"The approximately half-dozen friends whom her therapist-who had earned both a
terminal graduate degree and a medical degree-referred to as the depressed
person's Support System tended to be either female acquaintances from
childhood or else girls she had roomed with at various stages of her school
career, nurturing and comparatively undamaged women who now lived in all
manner of different cities and whom the depressed person often had not laid
eyes on in years and years, and whom she called late in the evening, long-
distance, for badly needed sharing and support and just a few well-chosen
words to help her get some realistic perspective on the day's despair and get
centered and gather together the strength to fight through the emotional agony
of the next day, and to whom, when she telephoned, the depressed person always
apologized for dragging them down or coming off as boring or self-pitying or
repellent or taking them away from their active, vibrant, largely pain-free
long-distance lives.")

~~~
throwanem
Existentialist prose is agonizing to read no matter the person in which it's
written. It leaves me flabbergasted that anyone could possibly describe as
'tight' such stacks and piles and reams of words, whole paragraphs at a time
of them without the leaven of a period and barely even a comma as a kindness
to the reader, until one feels one's head is being slowly shoved through
wallpaper paste - and in both cases one eventually comes to feel that to
finally suffocate would be a mercy.

Having not looked closely before now into _Infinite Jest_ , I think I better
understand why it serves as such a _pons asinorum_ for literary fiction in
general. It takes a more than ordinarily diligent and accommodating person to
get through it at all without her eyes glazing over, much less to come out the
other end with any sense of what actually happened between front cover and
back.

(Oh, also: "ghastlily"? _Really?_ Far be it from me to speak ill of the dead,
but...)

~~~
lisper
Now _that_ was some well-written prose! I wish I could upvote you ten times.

~~~
doug1001
i nearly posted an almost identical comment as you; then i thought, well this
person is probably chair of the Contemporary Literature Dept at Amherst, etc.
so one should expect insight like this

~~~
throwanem
Not that I don't appreciate the thought, but given what I know of academia, I
think I'm more horrified than flattered. The banal enormities one must no
doubt both suffer and inflict, to achieve tenure in the humanities...no,
thanks. If I'm to wind up in a hell of my own devising, I should at least like
to hope I've the wit to make it a livelier one than that.

~~~
mercer
You do have a very, uh, 'Literature Department' way of communicating though,
surely you're aware of that? I figured you were doing it to make a point...

But so anyways, by all means write exactly as you feel like writing. I'm a
huge fan of DFW, for example, precisely because he is all fancy and colloquial
at the same time, which happens to tickle my fancy quite a bunch. I just
wanted to point it out.

~~~
throwanem
Do you mean by that to say I write like a pretentious ass? Because if so, well
spotted! I'm absolutely a pretentious ass. Like any such, I thrive best well
away from others of my ilk, because we can't help striking sparks off one
another; based on what I've seen of Eng lit academia, I tend therefore to
think it is the wrong hothouse for me.

~~~
mercer
I still don't get how being a pretentious ass and wanting to distance yourself
from your ilk is best achieved by emulating their style.

Either you don't give a shit about 'them' and write as pretentiously as you
desire, or, like myself, you adjust your style to distance yourself from
'them' because you dislike the association.

As it is, it's rather confusing to me because I can't tell the difference
between you and the 'Eng lit academia' you seem to wish to avoid.

All that said: I don't think you write like a pretentious ass and I feel
anyone should communicate however they want as long as the message comes
across. And personally I like your style. So rock on, I guess :). But it's
essentially what DFW is doing too, I think.

------
nartsbtaa
DFW's writing comes up from time to time, and I always react by venting the
frustration I feel with his work, which I promptly destroy because it seems
wrong to criticize a (relatively recently) dead man.

But I'll say it: his writing style is incredibly self-indulgent and dreadfully
dull. I guess it's a matter of taste, but it takes a unique talent to attend a
pornography award show and afterparty, and churn out something as soulless,
humorless, and completely devoid of a point-of-view as "Big Red Son."

I'll probably delete this soon -- I feel like an awful person for writing it,
although I'm not entirely sure why.

~~~
fullshark
I thought "Big Red Son" was hilarious. Humor comes from the clash of high
culture with low culture. I'm not sure what the point of view was but I'd
guess it's "we're all human here" which is a common POV of Wallace's work.

~~~
krylon
The humor is so dry it makes the pages all dusty. I liked Big Red Son very
much, too.

------
networthless
Aaron Swartz's explanation of Infinite Jest's ending comes highly recommended-
not to mention their convergent trajectories. Their deaths greatly
impoverished the public intellect.

------
ericzawo
I'm really trying to start and finish Infinite Jest but the sheer girth of the
book is discouraging me from bringing it on my commute.

~~~
smacktoward
Taking on _Infinite Jest_ as your introduction to David Foster Wallace is a
little like getting started in rock climbing by tackling Mount Everest.

A much friendlier/more accessible place to start is _A Supposedly Fun Thing I
'll Never Do Again_ ([https://www.amazon.com/Supposedly-Fun-Thing-Never-
Again/dp/0...](https://www.amazon.com/Supposedly-Fun-Thing-Never-
Again/dp/0316925284)), a collection of his essays. They're shorter, tighter
and generally much better commute reading.

~~~
paulrpotts
I actually find his non-fiction in general to be much more satisfying than his
fiction. He was such a gifted guy, and so funny, but when writing fiction I
just feel like he was un-grounded to anything relevant to me, just wandering
in the depths of his pyrotechnic writing-for-its-own-sake. For example in _The
Pale King_, as an English major with lots of experience deconstructing and
analyzing texts, I can see how subtle and clever his portraits of the
characters are, but after a while I find I just don't care, because the story
isn't interesting me as a story. Reading his non-fiction, I feel like he's
always getting somewhere, and it's usually much more interesting to me.

~~~
erikpukinskis
Not to detract from your overall argument, but dinging The Pale King for not
getting anywhere is a bit unfair, what with him dying before completing it.

------
dominotw
why are depressed ppl always shown to be hanging out with cats. Maybe cats are
depressing them [1]

[http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2014/02/20/cat-bites-
depression...](http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2014/02/20/cat-bites-
depression_n_4823339.html)

------
tnorthcutt
Anyone have a link to this in plain text?

~~~
roflc0ptic
curl [http://harpers.org/wp-
content/uploads/HarpersMagazine-1998-0...](http://harpers.org/wp-
content/uploads/HarpersMagazine-1998-01-0059425.pdf) > depressedwallace.pdf

pdftotext depressedwallace.pdf > depressedwallace.txt

------
hughes
Explaining depression with childhood trauma always makes me uncomfortable.
What are those without vestigial wounds to make of their own misery?

~~~
mercer
Why would one exclude the other?

------
NumberCruncher
I don't get it why would anyone read something like this. I mean it is not bad
but simply hurts my brain.

~~~
haroldp
To gain insight into minds like the Depressed Person's - not just as described
dryly, but actually experienced first-hand as a result of the way it is
written.

~~~
NumberCruncher
I understand the purpose of the writing style. And it works on me. That's why
my brain hurts. My question was why anybody would do this to himself?
Masochism?

~~~
haroldp
Probably the most important thing that literature can do, in my opinion, is
transport us into someone else's mind. Even if it isn't necessarily pleasant,
it can still be broadening.

I feel the way you do about Eraserhead, to some extent. It's an amazing work
of genius that I'll never watch again, because it made me feel physically il.
I'm still glad I watched it once.

~~~
NumberCruncher
Ok, that's a valid point. I putted the movie on my to do list.

------
draw_down
It's our parents' fault we're fucked up. But it's our fault that we stay
fucked up.

