Oblivion
by Alex Rose
SEPTEMBER 19, 2008 TAGS:
Daybreak in Brooklyn. It's a muted, orangey-pink affair; the sun's hedging, indecisive.
I can't sleep. It's the weekend of the annual Brooklyn Book Festival, where the nation's best independent presses gather at Borough Hall to promote their catalogues, and by this point probably everyone's heard the news, the same news that's kept me up half the night: David Foster Wallace is dead.
Such a strange thing. The suicide — the violent manner of the act — and the sudden loss of a still-young yet towering literary figure.
I'm supposed to be spending the day at the Akashic Books booth, where my tiny Hotel St. George imprint occupies a humble corner pocket, but I'm slow to rise, and from half a mile away I can anticipate the weariness at an otherwise high-energy fair. I step outside to a sweltering yet overcast morning. I'm reminded of the moment in Wallace's nail-on-the-head Celebrity cruise lines travelogue, "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again," when he quotes a sunbather in a deck chair noting, in all earnestness, that "it's the humidity rather than the heat."
Walking past the actual Hotel St. George, I run into fellow author and Brooklyn Heights native, Tim McLoughlin (Heart of the Old Country). We exchange pleasantries until the inevitable comes up, and his smile flattens into his salty goatee. We shake our heads. Neither of us can believe it. Wallace was a giant, we agree. A monumental writer, a brilliant cultural critic.
I continue across Cadman Plaza, calling to mind the panoptic sprawl of the Wallace universe. In a single collection, he'd shift ambidextrously from the chauvinism of John Updike, to the linguistic horn-locking between descriptivist lexicographers and prescriptivist grammarians, to the sociology of the porn industry, to the culinary ethics of lobster preparation — all subjects exhaustively investigated and supercharged with amphetaminic virtuosity.
And that's only his non-fiction. A typical Wallace short story collection will leapfrog from genre to genre, style to style, subject to subject. A son reflects on a memory of his father "waggling" his penis at him for no apparent reason; a wife investigates the nature of her sexual inhibitions; a pop quiz masquerades as a metafiction masquerading as confession. Wallace has always seemed to me like an echolaliac, or a savant; someone preternaturally attuned to the world's minutiae and imbued with an ability to reproduce it flawlessly and effortlessly.
But it's the sentences themselves that nail us. This is what attracted Kelly Link, author of Magic For Beginners and co-founder of Small Beer Press, to the Wallace world. It's what caught the eye of Rachel Fershleiser, editor of the best-selling anthology, Not Quite What I Was Planning. The Wallacean-long sentence is like an exhaustive tour through the gnarled fissures of the Wallace brain, vertiginous and bifurcating and yet somehow weirdly clean and elegant and sensical. With all its criss-crossing tangents and parallels, its divergent paths and serpentine coilings, his language is as close to the actual structure of thought as those of any writer living or dead. What's insane is how sane his books actually are. What might appear to be achingly convoluted turns out to be perfectly worked out.
Perhaps this is why Wallace's death feels to so many of us like a personal affront. "I feel gutted," says Porochista Khakpour (Sons and Other Flammable Objects). It's not just the brutality of the hanging itself, nor the generic, inexplicable why, but also the feeling that some sacred trust had been betrayed. Devotees toured those labyrinthine lobes of his the way he'd toured the Celebrity cruise ship, inspecting every inch in meticulous detail, from the steamy grimy bowels to the antiseptic upper decks, and had disembarked at the end of the journey knowing it all so intimately that the thought of such a massive, well-engineered vessel suddenly capsizing at sea seems totally implausible.
As author and New Yorker editor Ben Greenman (Superbad) tells me, "You almost get the feeling it's going to turn out to be a super-dark prank, an Andy Kaufman stunt or something. Or at least you want it to."
•
A discernible fatigue begins to set in as the afternoon goes on and the heat rises to hellish levels. Publishers are sweating like alcoholics. Attendees fan themselves with folded copies of the festival guide. It's around this time that the lip service to Wallace begins to diminish; exhausted by the sun, people are now less hesitant to discuss the darker stuff.
The poet and novelist Tao Lin (Eeeeee Eee Eeee) admits he was not surprised by the suicide. "There was a depressive nature to his work," he said. "It was expected." I think back to stories like "The Depressed Person," "Incarnations of Burned Children," and "Suicide as a Kind of Present" and find it hard to disagree.
Rumors about Wallace's history of substance abuse are kicked about; some suggest a possible relapse. The term "inner demons" is heard over and over. "Who knows what goes on in someone's head?" says Arthur Nersessian (The Swing Voter of Staten Island), wiping sweat from his brow.
Dennis Johnson, who once lived with Wallace at an art residency in upstate New York, describes him as "intense in every possible sense." Intensely friendly and intensely funny, yes, but also intensely cynical, intensely serious, and intensely aggressive. "Particularly when it came to those tennis matches," he adds, which were "downright murderous.1
Looking back at Wallace's writing, one can't help but read certain passages as morbidly predictive. Indeed, his humor is not simply dark but black; a palpable, oily, grit-on-the-grill black. He finds the gangrenous yuck behind the cheerful, sniffs out the acidic and corrosive beneath the hygienic. The appearance of contentment smacks him as servile, a consequence of forced gleefulness, like a detainee reporting by video that his captors are treating him "just fine."2
Even a cursory look at the aforementioned travelogue reveals a troubling fixation on the macabre. One of the first items he mentions is a recent suicide — a 16-year-old who "did a Brody" off the upper deck. This sourly comic anecdote is followed by the deadpan gambit: "There is something about a mass-market Luxury Cruise that's unbearably sad." Does this suggest a more-than-casual identification with the suicidal teen? He goes on:
The word's overused and banalified now, despair, but it's a serious word and I'm using it seriously. For me it denotes a simple admixture — a weird yearning for death combined with a crushing sense of my own smallness and futility that presents as a fear of death. It's maybe close to what people call dread or angst. But it's not these things, quite. It's more like wanting to die in order to escape the unbearable feeling of becoming aware that I'm small and weak and selfish and going without any doubt at all to die. It's wanting to jump overboard.
Disturbing as it is — and maybe a bit shocking out of context — one finds similar sentiments spread across his many essays and fictions. The word "despair" bobs up again and again, as does "death" and "dread." In his fiction, he frequents terms like "wrist-slitter," "funereal," "nightmarish," "impotent," "bovine," "imprisoned." Partly what made his humor so infectious — at least to me — was his way of comparing deceptively normal happenings (or non-happenings, like waiting in lines) to transparently horrific things like extermination camps, gulags, torture chambers and slaughterhouses.
But these trenchant descriptors and metaphors suggest not just a flare for comic juxtaposition, but also a heightened sensitivity to contradiction: the ironic incongruity, the tangled loop, the tuneful discordance — paradox by any other name.
Indeed, paradoxes abound in his pages. Everything and More, a "piece of pop technical writing," as he understatedly described it, expounds on the concept of infinity via the late 19th century set theorist, Georg Cantor. Virtually every page of this "booklet" hums with the ecstatic wonder of a man enraptured by a great puzzle, and his personal identification with "a figure of great complexity and pathos.” What I find illuminating about this particular (critically panned and popularly neglected) work, in light of the greater scope of Wallace's career, is the implication that he may have equated the vicious infinite regression ("VIR") with solipsism — the
belief that no one exists but oneself.
One particular VIR that tickled Wallace was the famous self-referential paradox proposed by the Cretan philosopher Epimenides, who declared that all Cretans are liars. For this statement to be true, he would obviously have to be lying; yet in lying, he would necessarily have negated the statement’s truth. In other words, to tell the truth, he would've had to lie, and in order to lie, he would've had to tell the truth, and so on, ad infinitum.3 There's an exact analogy between this and the morbid conundrum cited above: the yearning for death as an escape from the fear of death.
Wallace found these kinds of paradoxes irresistible. Ostensibly, they were stimulating as unsolvable puzzles, but I suspect he may have seen in them something terribly absurd and terribly sad and somehow relevant to the human condition. According to Wallace, the default state of existence is self-centeredness: We avoid mention of this basic fact, even awareness of it, because it's so "socially repulsive." Yet there it is, hard-wired to the human engine like language or memory, an urgent and inescapable sense of me-ness. If we give in to it, we become its mindless slave; if we try to ignore it, we risk spiraling into narcissism. To wit, staying alert and attentive in the face of paralyzing monotony is a constant challenge, but the real danger lies in becoming so concerned about staying attentive that reality itself becomes just one more enabling abstraction, one more thing to get lost in.
In what I imagine will soon become a widely cited document, a commencement speech he gave at Kenyon College in 2005, Wallace elaborated on this by invoking the "old cliché" about the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master:
This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger. And I submit that this is what the real, no-bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out.
"There's no moral to this story," says Porochista Khakpour, as the narrowing sunlight catches the windows of the old Borough Hall court house.
A life's work, of course, can no sooner be boiled down to a single trope than a life itself can be reduced to an epitaph. But in the absence of any kind of conclusive assessment, we may at least allow ourselves, for a moment, to be humbled by the enigmas themselves, the ingenious contradictions and impossible constructions that were David Foster Wallace's gifts.
At its best, his work fearlessly pivots on the sharp edge between absurdity and despair. One moment it's aboard a ridiculous cruise line, grudgingly stepping along with the "electric slide," the next it's hurling itself overboard, irrevocably, into oblivion.
--
1This isn't so hard to believe, given his extensive treatment of the subject. The latest, his breathless and unapologetically hagiographic feature in the New York Times Magazine last year, "Federer as Religious Experience," was enough to suggest how serious a player he must have been himself.
2Maybe the joke is on us. In reporting to his audience the strangeness and beauty of his encounters, was he perhaps cryptically trying to communicate a deeper blackness beneath an artifice of "superficial" blackness? Was he in fact hiding his demons in plain sight, blinking to us in Morse Code the word "T-O-R-T-U-R-E”?
3This VIR underlies Gödel's "Incompleteness Theorem" — another obsession of Wallace's — which states (in the language of Calculus) that all formal systems, including the Russell/Whitehead Principia, can never be complete, because by definition they each must contain at least one statement that is at once both true and false, which elementary logic tells us is contradictory. And if the system contains a contradiction, it cannot be 100% foolproof and airtight, as mathematicians since Euclid have believed. Therefore, mathematics itself must have, lurking in its very DNA, a deadly inconsistency.
Alex Rose is the author of The Musical Illusionist and Other Tales.
I can't sleep. It's the weekend of the annual Brooklyn Book Festival, where the nation's best independent presses gather at Borough Hall to promote their catalogues, and by this point probably everyone's heard the news, the same news that's kept me up half the night: David Foster Wallace is dead.
Such a strange thing. The suicide — the violent manner of the act — and the sudden loss of a still-young yet towering literary figure. I'm supposed to be spending the day at the Akashic Books booth, where my tiny Hotel St. George imprint occupies a humble corner pocket, but I'm slow to rise, and from half a mile away I can anticipate the weariness at an otherwise high-energy fair. I step outside to a sweltering yet overcast morning. I'm reminded of the moment in Wallace's nail-on-the-head Celebrity cruise lines travelogue, "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again," when he quotes a sunbather in a deck chair noting, in all earnestness, that "it's the humidity rather than the heat."
Walking past the actual Hotel St. George, I run into fellow author and Brooklyn Heights native, Tim McLoughlin (Heart of the Old Country). We exchange pleasantries until the inevitable comes up, and his smile flattens into his salty goatee. We shake our heads. Neither of us can believe it. Wallace was a giant, we agree. A monumental writer, a brilliant cultural critic.
I continue across Cadman Plaza, calling to mind the panoptic sprawl of the Wallace universe. In a single collection, he'd shift ambidextrously from the chauvinism of John Updike, to the linguistic horn-locking between descriptivist lexicographers and prescriptivist grammarians, to the sociology of the porn industry, to the culinary ethics of lobster preparation — all subjects exhaustively investigated and supercharged with amphetaminic virtuosity.
And that's only his non-fiction. A typical Wallace short story collection will leapfrog from genre to genre, style to style, subject to subject. A son reflects on a memory of his father "waggling" his penis at him for no apparent reason; a wife investigates the nature of her sexual inhibitions; a pop quiz masquerades as a metafiction masquerading as confession. Wallace has always seemed to me like an echolaliac, or a savant; someone preternaturally attuned to the world's minutiae and imbued with an ability to reproduce it flawlessly and effortlessly.
But it's the sentences themselves that nail us. This is what attracted Kelly Link, author of Magic For Beginners and co-founder of Small Beer Press, to the Wallace world. It's what caught the eye of Rachel Fershleiser, editor of the best-selling anthology, Not Quite What I Was Planning. The Wallacean-long sentence is like an exhaustive tour through the gnarled fissures of the Wallace brain, vertiginous and bifurcating and yet somehow weirdly clean and elegant and sensical. With all its criss-crossing tangents and parallels, its divergent paths and serpentine coilings, his language is as close to the actual structure of thought as those of any writer living or dead. What's insane is how sane his books actually are. What might appear to be achingly convoluted turns out to be perfectly worked out.
Perhaps this is why Wallace's death feels to so many of us like a personal affront. "I feel gutted," says Porochista Khakpour (Sons and Other Flammable Objects). It's not just the brutality of the hanging itself, nor the generic, inexplicable why, but also the feeling that some sacred trust had been betrayed. Devotees toured those labyrinthine lobes of his the way he'd toured the Celebrity cruise ship, inspecting every inch in meticulous detail, from the steamy grimy bowels to the antiseptic upper decks, and had disembarked at the end of the journey knowing it all so intimately that the thought of such a massive, well-engineered vessel suddenly capsizing at sea seems totally implausible.
As author and New Yorker editor Ben Greenman (Superbad) tells me, "You almost get the feeling it's going to turn out to be a super-dark prank, an Andy Kaufman stunt or something. Or at least you want it to."
•
A discernible fatigue begins to set in as the afternoon goes on and the heat rises to hellish levels. Publishers are sweating like alcoholics. Attendees fan themselves with folded copies of the festival guide. It's around this time that the lip service to Wallace begins to diminish; exhausted by the sun, people are now less hesitant to discuss the darker stuff.
The poet and novelist Tao Lin (Eeeeee Eee Eeee) admits he was not surprised by the suicide. "There was a depressive nature to his work," he said. "It was expected." I think back to stories like "The Depressed Person," "Incarnations of Burned Children," and "Suicide as a Kind of Present" and find it hard to disagree.
Rumors about Wallace's history of substance abuse are kicked about; some suggest a possible relapse. The term "inner demons" is heard over and over. "Who knows what goes on in someone's head?" says Arthur Nersessian (The Swing Voter of Staten Island), wiping sweat from his brow.
Dennis Johnson, who once lived with Wallace at an art residency in upstate New York, describes him as "intense in every possible sense." Intensely friendly and intensely funny, yes, but also intensely cynical, intensely serious, and intensely aggressive. "Particularly when it came to those tennis matches," he adds, which were "downright murderous.1
Looking back at Wallace's writing, one can't help but read certain passages as morbidly predictive. Indeed, his humor is not simply dark but black; a palpable, oily, grit-on-the-grill black. He finds the gangrenous yuck behind the cheerful, sniffs out the acidic and corrosive beneath the hygienic. The appearance of contentment smacks him as servile, a consequence of forced gleefulness, like a detainee reporting by video that his captors are treating him "just fine."2
Even a cursory look at the aforementioned travelogue reveals a troubling fixation on the macabre. One of the first items he mentions is a recent suicide — a 16-year-old who "did a Brody" off the upper deck. This sourly comic anecdote is followed by the deadpan gambit: "There is something about a mass-market Luxury Cruise that's unbearably sad." Does this suggest a more-than-casual identification with the suicidal teen? He goes on:
The word's overused and banalified now, despair, but it's a serious word and I'm using it seriously. For me it denotes a simple admixture — a weird yearning for death combined with a crushing sense of my own smallness and futility that presents as a fear of death. It's maybe close to what people call dread or angst. But it's not these things, quite. It's more like wanting to die in order to escape the unbearable feeling of becoming aware that I'm small and weak and selfish and going without any doubt at all to die. It's wanting to jump overboard.
Disturbing as it is — and maybe a bit shocking out of context — one finds similar sentiments spread across his many essays and fictions. The word "despair" bobs up again and again, as does "death" and "dread." In his fiction, he frequents terms like "wrist-slitter," "funereal," "nightmarish," "impotent," "bovine," "imprisoned." Partly what made his humor so infectious — at least to me — was his way of comparing deceptively normal happenings (or non-happenings, like waiting in lines) to transparently horrific things like extermination camps, gulags, torture chambers and slaughterhouses.
But these trenchant descriptors and metaphors suggest not just a flare for comic juxtaposition, but also a heightened sensitivity to contradiction: the ironic incongruity, the tangled loop, the tuneful discordance — paradox by any other name.
Indeed, paradoxes abound in his pages. Everything and More, a "piece of pop technical writing," as he understatedly described it, expounds on the concept of infinity via the late 19th century set theorist, Georg Cantor. Virtually every page of this "booklet" hums with the ecstatic wonder of a man enraptured by a great puzzle, and his personal identification with "a figure of great complexity and pathos.” What I find illuminating about this particular (critically panned and popularly neglected) work, in light of the greater scope of Wallace's career, is the implication that he may have equated the vicious infinite regression ("VIR") with solipsism — the
belief that no one exists but oneself.
One particular VIR that tickled Wallace was the famous self-referential paradox proposed by the Cretan philosopher Epimenides, who declared that all Cretans are liars. For this statement to be true, he would obviously have to be lying; yet in lying, he would necessarily have negated the statement’s truth. In other words, to tell the truth, he would've had to lie, and in order to lie, he would've had to tell the truth, and so on, ad infinitum.3 There's an exact analogy between this and the morbid conundrum cited above: the yearning for death as an escape from the fear of death.
Wallace found these kinds of paradoxes irresistible. Ostensibly, they were stimulating as unsolvable puzzles, but I suspect he may have seen in them something terribly absurd and terribly sad and somehow relevant to the human condition. According to Wallace, the default state of existence is self-centeredness: We avoid mention of this basic fact, even awareness of it, because it's so "socially repulsive." Yet there it is, hard-wired to the human engine like language or memory, an urgent and inescapable sense of me-ness. If we give in to it, we become its mindless slave; if we try to ignore it, we risk spiraling into narcissism. To wit, staying alert and attentive in the face of paralyzing monotony is a constant challenge, but the real danger lies in becoming so concerned about staying attentive that reality itself becomes just one more enabling abstraction, one more thing to get lost in.
In what I imagine will soon become a widely cited document, a commencement speech he gave at Kenyon College in 2005, Wallace elaborated on this by invoking the "old cliché" about the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master:
This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger. And I submit that this is what the real, no-bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out.
"There's no moral to this story," says Porochista Khakpour, as the narrowing sunlight catches the windows of the old Borough Hall court house.
A life's work, of course, can no sooner be boiled down to a single trope than a life itself can be reduced to an epitaph. But in the absence of any kind of conclusive assessment, we may at least allow ourselves, for a moment, to be humbled by the enigmas themselves, the ingenious contradictions and impossible constructions that were David Foster Wallace's gifts.
At its best, his work fearlessly pivots on the sharp edge between absurdity and despair. One moment it's aboard a ridiculous cruise line, grudgingly stepping along with the "electric slide," the next it's hurling itself overboard, irrevocably, into oblivion.
--
1This isn't so hard to believe, given his extensive treatment of the subject. The latest, his breathless and unapologetically hagiographic feature in the New York Times Magazine last year, "Federer as Religious Experience," was enough to suggest how serious a player he must have been himself.
2Maybe the joke is on us. In reporting to his audience the strangeness and beauty of his encounters, was he perhaps cryptically trying to communicate a deeper blackness beneath an artifice of "superficial" blackness? Was he in fact hiding his demons in plain sight, blinking to us in Morse Code the word "T-O-R-T-U-R-E”?
3This VIR underlies Gödel's "Incompleteness Theorem" — another obsession of Wallace's — which states (in the language of Calculus) that all formal systems, including the Russell/Whitehead Principia, can never be complete, because by definition they each must contain at least one statement that is at once both true and false, which elementary logic tells us is contradictory. And if the system contains a contradiction, it cannot be 100% foolproof and airtight, as mathematicians since Euclid have believed. Therefore, mathematics itself must have, lurking in its very DNA, a deadly inconsistency.
Alex Rose is the author of The Musical Illusionist and Other Tales.
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