Note: Cross-posted from my cultural-criticism blog Working Notes, which you should subscribe to.

It’s hard to “get” to David Foster Wallace—I mean the actual things he wrote, including most obviously Infinite Jest and the two less popular novels on either side of it,The Broom of the System and The Pale King; three short-story collections; and a number of essays, some reported and some not, one of which inaugurated an entire genre (the “cruise ship essay”). All these works seem to be buried under his reputation, which has layers like geographic strata. But now he’s being reassessed, partly because of a thirtieth anniversary re-issue of Infinite Jest, and pieces on him, after burning a decent chunk of their word count digging through those layers, are trying to come to terms with at the molten, living material underneath. What actually is the deal with these books, these cantilevered sentences, the polymorphic vocabulary, the moral intensity combined with complex structures and an often-discouraging opacity?

The first thing everyone knows about Wallace is that he’s a postmodern writer. This characterizes both his style, which likes to dare you to believe or disbelieve in all kinds of jokey conceits, as well as his themes: self-consciousness, reflexivity, the omnipresence of mediating technologies that block out authentic experience. Wallace himself clearly felt he was writing about some new and fallen social order, as evidenced by the title of the super-short story that opens Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. Here it is in its entirety:

A RADICALLY CONDENSED HISTORY OF POSTINDUSTRIAL LIFE
When they were introduced, he made a witticism, hoping to be liked. She laughed extremely hard, hoping to be liked. Then each drove home alone, staring straight ahead, with the very same twist to their faces.
The man who’d introduced them didn’t much like either of them, though he acted as if he did, anxious as he was to preserve good relations at all times. One never knew, after all, now did one now did one now did one.

But I’d like to offer, not as the way of understanding DFW but as a way, the idea of him as in outlook a very nineteenth century writer instead, specifically in his affinities with Nathaniel Hawthorne.

The comparison came to me after I read a collection of Hawthorne’s stories. Think back to AP Lit andThe Scarlet Letter and you’ll recall some of his characteristics: unembarrassed allegories; a compulsive gloominess; a double- and triple-underlined religious moralism; and a concomitant obsession with sin, guilt, and hypocrisy. Etc etc. But it’s above all Hawthorne’s implicit worldview and structure of feeling which to my mind connects him to Wallace.

This worldview, this structure of feeling, is above all an American one. Though Hawthorne is a Romantic writer connected to European predecessors like E.A. Hoffmann, he also lived in the context of the United States’ idiosyncratic national situation as a young and self-consciously (really, self-deceptively) historyless country, stitched together by commerce and a general democratic Christian culture rather than tradition: the correlate of this “free” and individualistic society is a kind of existential weightlessness or free-fall. I’m not sure if it’s been noted that what makes Hawthorne’s depiction of “evil” so compelling (and modern-feeling) is its often causeless or “empty” character. You don’t learn (or have to learn) what the Unpardonable Sin is in “Ethan Brandt,” just as the black veil in “The Minister’s Black Veil” represents all sins, not any specific sin. What matters is that sin is so imminent, it’s right there, nobody will stop you; this isn’t far off from the “random” killing of an Arab in The Stranger.

This individualistic existentialism is of a piece, not in conflict, with Hawthorne’s moralism. For instance, though his fascination with his Puritan ancestry and with a vision of a sternly religious New England past seems to reflect a traditionalist, communal sensibility, such communities are often revealed as or devolve into associations of individual sinners connected only by their guilt. And that guilt itself seems to draw its particular character from moral surveillance moving out of the external social order—those Puritan leaders, the king, priests and bishops—into the individual’s inner conscience. This peculiarly American guilty conscience is exactly what gives Hawthorne’s work its astonishing interior intensity, even as it motivates a search for some more collective form of life: “The simplest and truest thing to say of Hawthorne’s human vision,” as an essay on him notes, “is that for him the essence of wrong is aloneness; you begin and you end with that.”

So: for Hawthorne/America, moralism, self-consciousness, and liberal individualism all form a coneptual chain.

It’s surprising how easily you can adapt these conceptual coordinates for DFW’s writing. Nobody in recent memory has written with such terrible exactitude—e.g. in “The Depressed Person,” in “Good Old Neon”—about the way the self-consciousness mind spins when it reaches for some external grounding but finds only itself. If Hawthorne made the soul a cave with depth, in Wallace it’s a full-blown underground labyrinth full of dead ends and false exits. In both cases, each author’s power to convey inner experience is organically linked to a manic moralism and the search for a way into some more social, other-centred existence.

More similarities: how often, in both cases, personal love is the way out. The marriages that cap off "The Great Carbuncle" or "The May-Pole of Marymount” have their postmodern counterparts in the miraculously unselfish (but always heterosexual) offerings of person-to-person grace that cap off the stories “Think” and the "Brief Interviews with Hideous Men #6." (“I’d fallen in love with her. I believed she could save me.”)

Or the valorization of unselfconsciousness: In Hawthorne, the protagonist in the “Great Stone Face” who’s a moral hero but doesn’t know it; “Feathertop,” where an animated scarecrow is ironically more moral than flesh and blood New Englanders. In Wallace, the ability of the narrator in “Signifying Nothing” to just let go of a bizarre childhood memory of possible sexual abuse; the ability of “David Foster Wallace” in “Good Old Neon” to tell his brain, ‘Not another word.’

Or the valorization of a fallen communal past: just as Hawthorne idealized a certain vision of Old New England (though, as I mentioned, he couldn’t help but undercut it), so Wallace’s writing on TV casts it as a malign force that inverted the public-spirited America of “E pluribus unum” into the fragmented and lonely America of “E unibus pluram”

So: DFW as late-capitalist Hawthorne, Hawthorne as early-capitalist DFW. Obviously, there are differences; I don’t mean to discount DFW’s connections to postmodern authors like Pynchon or Delillo, or his unique traits (for instance, his incredible talent for description, which has no place at all in Hawthorne or in 99% of writers). But the similarities are there and real.

There and real and problematic. All this is ground-clearing for an admission: I kind of don’t like David Foster Wallace’s writing that much. In fact, I really hate it sometimes.

I was a big Wallace fan in high school, even writing two atrocious imitation-DFW stories that will never, ever see the light of day. I still like a lot of what he does or is about. But it strikes me now that his very American sensibility, which connects him to Hawthorne, is also what irritates me about him.

The moralism, for instance. DFW basically adopted Hawthorne’s equation between easy guilt and strenous virtue. It’s wild how fucking hard he makes being a good person seem in his “This is Water” speech, and I get it, of course (raised Catholic). But so often in his writing morality is an essentially individual concern. Rare are the visions of a virtuous collective life—I think Ennet House in Infinite Jest comes closest, but even this is a very Christian, individual-focused morality, both in the book and in the real institution of Alcoholics Anonymous.

This morality is also deeply suspicious of pleasure. Pleasure for Wallace tends to be an addiction-in-waiting, and the good (as in virtuous) life is de-linked, in a puritanical fashion, from the good (as in enjoyable, comfortable) life. You can read all 1000+ pages of Infinite Jest and come away with the sad feeling that this is a guy who never enjoyed a picnic in the park with his friends, noshing on wine and cheese. Of course, the real DFW might have, but it doesn’t filter into his literary worldview. Europeans seem not to fall into this false dichotomy. Think of how Paris helped the terrified Christian James Baldwin develop a deeply sensuous, a morally serious engagement with, pleasure: pleasure in life, pleasure as a literary mode.

This suspicion of pleasure and moralism combine in the worst way in Wallace’s conservative attitude to sex, shown in an essay wisely left out of any collections called “Hail the Returning Dragon, Clothed in New Fire,” which tries to argue that AIDS has inadvertantly done us a favour by reminding us that sex is “serious.” I don’t really have anything to say about this; it speaks for itself.

Too, despite the focus on the twists and turns of the inner mind, moral intensity is sometimes purchased at the cost of attention to emotional nuances. Though Wallace famously trashed Updike, the older author easily beats him in terms of perceiving and portraying all the fine gradations of intermingled hate, love, indifference, attentiveness, and ambivalence that develop in complex patterns in people’s interactions. That, to me, is a much more grown up, more psychologically acute, view of how people work. I’m not sure where I first saw the observation that Wallace tended to see love as an all-or-nothing switch, a matter of religious conversion, rather than a complicated, ongoing relationship, but it’s absolutely true.

I often feel that Wallace let unguilty pleasure into his writing through just one avenue: those descriptions. Those sentences running arabesques around beautiful details, coiling and uncoiling, caressing every facet of ordinary reality, whether it’s the ethnic composition of cruise ship staffs, the swings and shifts of tennis players’ bodies, the textures of office chairs and carpets, the feel of air itself. Such attention certainly seems to me like love of a kind, though he seemed to grow suspicious of this too, which is why a lot of his writing in Oblivion insists on being ugly, forcing us to work through ugliness.

While writing The Pale King, Wallace wrote a little contextless snippet of an lesson he wanted to work toward in his text:

Bliss—a-second-by-second joy and gratitude at the gift of being alive, conscious—lies on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom. Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you can find (Tax Returns, Televised Golf) and, in waves, a boredom like you’ve never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it’s like stepping from black and white into color. Like water after days in the desert. Instant bliss in every atom.

This is what he was trying to get to—from “close attention,” a feeling of bliss. But he’d already hit it. Just open a story like “Forever Overhead” and read a passage like the following. Drink deep, and descend:

A dull field of dry grass and hard weeds, old dandelions’ downy heads exploding and snowing up in a rising wind. And past all this, reddened by a round slow September sun, are mountains, jagged, their tops’ sharp angles darkening into definition against a deep red tired light. Against the red their sharp connected tops form a spiked line, an EKG of the dying day.

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Writings