The philosophical underpinnings of David Foster Wallace's fiction. - By James Ryerson - Slate Magazine

David Foster Wallace reads David Markson's Wittgenstein's Mistress

"I am my world" is what Wallace had in mind when he spoke of "the loss of the whole external world" in the Tractatus. There is no difference, ultimately, for Wittgenstein between solipsism and realism (solipsism "coincides with pure realism," he writes). For Wallace, this was a harrowing equation, the dark emotional takeaway of the Tractatus's severe anti-metaphysics. This was also, for Wallace, what Markson had rendered imaginatively in his novel. Without ever raising these ideas explicitly, Markson had conveyed them with a special kind of clarity. Wittgenstein's Mistress, by echoing the Tractatus's brusque, dreamlike sentences and placing Kate in a cold, lonely, self-as-world cosmos, had managed, as Wallace put it, to "capture the flavor both of solipsism and of Wittgenstein." What's more, Wallace felt Markson had done something that even Wittgenstein hadn't been able to do: he humanized the intellectual problem, communicating "the consequences, for persons, of the practice of theory; the difference, say, between espousing 'solipsism' as a metaphysical 'position' & waking up one fine morning after a personal loss to find your grief apocalyptic, literally millennial, leaving you the last and only living thing on earth." That was something only fiction, not philosophy, could do.

Here Wallace not only finds the essence of storytelling but discovers the limits of logic. If you can explore your premise through example you rescue logic from inertness and humanize the narrative. The novel of ideas requires an energizing force - an emotional wallop - to make itself live in the imagination.

David Foster Wallace's Personal Files - Newsweek

The well-read DFW:

The archive also corrects Wallace’s reputation as one of the most abstruse of writers. Wallace’s notes to himself in Tolstoy’s essay “What Is Art?” strip back layers of received critical opinion and show a writer who is eager, above all, to connect. When Tolstoy throws down his decisive thunderbolt against art for aesthetics’ sake—“it is upon this capacity of man to receive another man’s expression of feeling and experience those feelings himself, that the activity of art is based”—Wallace underlines it emphatically, adding “Art as Empathy” in the margin (while the 9-year-old nods, somewhere, inside).

Unfinished David Foster Wallace Novel Gets Cover and Release Date - NYTimes.com

"The Pale King", April 15, 2011:

Text Patterns: jest the third

Milch argues that "content tests and verifies the implicit assumptions of form." In other words, a book about a megalomaniac hunting a white whale will be written with the same fervor and obsessiveness in order to address and eliminate alternative arguments. A novel that seeks to recreate Dublin on June 16, 1904 will build the city brick by brick through the free play and history of language and literature. These strategies are not intended to frustrate readers, but stand as proof of the the initial premise.

In contrast, Alan Jacobs writes that David Foster Wallace fails to achieve this in Infinite Jest because his obsessive writing style - the endless sprawl of sentences, the doubling-back, and mining for deeper and deeper meanings - is an end in itself; it does not speak to the content of the story or the world of the characters, but to its own formation. Perhaps what people like about IJ is not the novel itself, but the force of Wallace's intelligence and the tragedy of his condition. His books are not novels, but a hedge against depression and the possibility that words are not enough.

Smarter than You Think | The New York Review of Books

NYRB on the methods of David Foster Wallace:

"Planet Trillaphon" was only Wallace’s first attempt at combining the immediacy of vernacular voices with challenging structural choices, to the end of producing, as he told Lipsky, writing that could “capture and talk about the way the world feels on our nerve endings in a way that conventional realistic stuff can’t.” The Broom of the System would also end in an unfinished sentence (“‘I’m a man of my’”), and Infinite Jest, rooted in people attempting to navigate through a range of emotional extremes from adolescence to addiction, would internalize the will to evade conventional ideas of completion, the novel ending in a complete sentence but leaving the principal narrative strands and the fates of many of its characters, though suggested, in no conventional way resolved by book’s end.

Pale King

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.

Agents of a Great Despair

The NYT on DFW:

Mr. Wallace, who died Friday night at his home in Claremont, Calif., an apparent suicide, belonged to a generation of writers who grew up on the work of Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo and Robert Coover, a generation that came of age in the ‘60s and ‘70s and took discontinuity for granted. But while his own fiction often showcased his mastery of postmodern pyrotechnics — a cold but glittering arsenal of irony, self-consciousness and clever narrative hijinks — he was also capable of creating profoundly human flesh-and-blood characters with three-dimensional emotional lives. In a kind of aesthetic manifesto, he once wrote that irony and ridicule had become “agents of a great despair and stasis in U.S. culture” and mourned the loss of engagement with deep moral issues that animated the work of the great 19th-century novelists.