There's a long piece on David Foster Wallace in The New Yorker this week, as well as an excerpt from his unfinished novel on the IRS called The Pale King. Neither work does much to support the idea that he was the greatest writer of his generation. Nor do they bolster the romantic notion that his best work was still ahead of him. Indeed, in the biographical piece he is a much more broken, doomed and marginal figure than it seemed like he was during his heyday of the late 90s and early 00s. More importantly, his mental illness and eventual suicide come to overshadow and overdetermine the nature of his writing and his writing career. Inconclusiveness and ambivalence become the thing. An obsessive attention to mental processes, the inner lives of similarly obsessed or obsessive individuals, a mimesis of attitudes and manipulations. A drilling down into the mental life of boredom and the possibility of bliss that might exist just beyond. Add to this a basic mistrust of the transformative function of art and the possibility of redemption, and what you have is a writer struggling with the constancy of failure and despair.
When Infinite Jest came out, I was still in grad school and was both over-awed by and completely jealous of the dude in the bandana who had written the next Gravity's Rainbow. If this guy was already setting the literary world on fire, what the heck was I do wasting time in Grad School? So I read the novel in a spirit of ill will and envy in between working on my graduate thesis on Pynchon and Baudrillard. The long recursive sentences were maddening. The postmodern gestures felt both over the top and empty. The satire lacked sting. The novel began with Hal's breakdown sometime in the future of the future, and then abandoned his story half way through. The book only really came alive with the AA story line that finishes the novel. The whole thing finishes off as though it is embarassed of its sincerity and sentimentality and the fact that next great novel was a cliched narrative of drug recovery. The thousand pages, postmodern arm waving, and miles of footnotes became an expression of that embarrasment. Wallace was an experiential realist and emotional idealist who could trust neither his experience of reality nor his emotions and ideals. He therefore second guessed everything, reassessed everything, reconsidered and reevaluated everything and spun this near-autistic process into long searching sentences that threatened to destroy themselves as they threaded the divide between panic and paralysis.
As an object, reading (or more likely, carrying) Infinite Jest was a badge of honor. As a work of art, it was exhausting and insufferable.
But Pynchon's contemporaries had thought the same of Gravity's Rainbow. Even going so far as to deny him the Pulitzer Prize.
And Joyce's contemporaries had bemusedly tolerated Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, without really being convinced of their merit.
So perhaps my assessment wasn't an honest one. Maybe it wasn't him, but me. Maybe, as Coleridge says, I would have to work to overcome my ignorance of his understanding. The Broom of the System, written by a much younger man comes of as pretentious and wrong headed when read after Infinite Jest. Brief Interviews With Hideous Men takes up the Wallace style with a new spirit of misanthropy and loathing. Oblivion's tales of hideous people and corporate culture are meta-post-modern and unreadable. Each new book with the exception of his non-fiction collection A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, became more dispirting than the last. In the end, the prospect of a new Wallace novel became itself a supposedly fun thing.
According to The New Yorker version of David Foster Wallace, the author was less an artist than someone who was struggling to write his way through the pain of mental illness. His style and technique were symptomatic of this struggle, fanciful associations that lacked the imaginative possibility of transformation and return. If anything they dug deeper and more painfully and dysfunctionally into all those emotions and anxieties that language could not control. The scholarship, footnotes, and mathematical musings become a facade of faux-intellectualism used to disguise the emotional messiness that underpinned every word.
Even now, I can't decide whether his suicide invests his work with dark meaning or completely invalidates them as works of art. I think The Pale King in its incompleteness and failed aspirations will only deepen this problem.
