Thursday, November 11, 2010
infinite regress
Infinite Regress:
Writing About Writing and Not Writing
BY DONALD BRACKETT
"There is something missing....if I knew what it is then it wouldn't be so missing..."
Han, in The Recognitions, by William Gaddis, 1955
It has recently come to my attention that the meaning of life can be found in the 1996 novel by the late American author David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest. I can indeed confirm this, even though it is a delayed realization of some fifteen perplexed years. There are a number of explanations for why it took so long to realize that the meaning of life is easily found in Infinite Jest (page 492, to be exact) but those would not add anything salient to this basic empirical fact. The meaning of life also recurs on page 997 as well, as if for some sort of echo-effect that manages to reassure the astute reader that indeed, he or she is on the right track after all. But just where does that track lead? Did DFW find out? If so, after visiting from 1962-2008, he is regrettably no longer able to file his remarkable reports from the front. Or has he only gone on to the actual front? “One never knew, after all, now did one now, did one now did one.” As he himself said in the “radically condensed history of post-industrial life” from his Brief Interview With Hideous Men, 2007. Late late Wallace.
If one could envisage a large balcony jutting off a big old ornate building somewhere in the Swiss Alps (SA), with obscurely wounded inmates lounging on large deck chairs bundled in thick blankets and conversing about the meaning of life in each of their own distinct accents or dialects, then one could probably see that Harry Haller is there from the novel Steppenwolf, Hans Castorp is there from The Magic Mountain (he is their genial host in fact), Ulrich is there from The Man Without Qualities, Gwyon is there from The Recognitions, Benny Profane is there from Pynchon's V.,…should Salinger or…..God no, who wants to listen to Holden with his constant cringing and whining? Certainly not gentlemen of the caliber of Haller, Castorp and Ulrich. Old world, you know. He could always sit with Profane I suppose. After all, it’s a community of shadows of their former selves, or of their authors.
And of course, Hal Incandenza’s maker himself is also there from Infinite Jest. He looks tired. And why not, his was one hell of a ride. Blood-shot eyes that only his loving dogs Jeeves and Drone (or Bella and Warner) truly understand. His own personal V. was the under-read and over-written gem The Broom of the System in 1987, with Infinite Jest being an apparently obvious Gravity’s Rainbow-scaled achievement. At first glance.
But the remarkable thing is that the hyper-intelligent DFW, whose frenetic literary voice is already sorely missed, was not quite ever able to do what even a brilliant genius-thug like Norman Mailer was able to do: follow up the first astonishing salvo with a second barrage of brilliance: or in his case, pull off the great second follow-up novel and then hit the jackpot with a third that surpasses it. Mailer even explained himself eloquently in the opening introduction to Barbary Shore as someone desperate to prove that The Naked and The Dead had not been the full measure of all his talent at once, a one-shot deal. Not to mention The Deer Park or his masterpiece, Advertisements For Myself.
Surpass Infinite Jest though? You see, it has to be Infinite Jest that is considered DFW’s Naked and The Dead, see? Because The Broom of The System was nowhere near as gigantic a household name as IJ (incredibly enough given its girth), and since it went by relatively unnoticed by the mass reading audience, it was not something to even be surpassed. Therein lies the dilemma. Which is why such an effort on DFW’s part invariably leads to infinite regress: that foggy cul-de-sac in the overcrowded city of thoughts devoted to searching for origins and authenticity. Where there is none. Perfect for the math-sodden wretch who wrote Everything and More. Though at least in deference to his considerable and profound gifts, we can certainly say that he did manage to produce a whirlwind of non-novelistic writings that remain equally incandescent, pun intended, so called non-fiction essays that stand in counterbalance to his two and a half novels.
There have been some excellent appreciations of this talented writer’s work, the most notable of which was David Lipsky’s recent and remarkable Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, but there is something missing in the portrait that unfolds itself through his shimmering conversations with the late author while on a book publicity tour. If I knew what was missing, then it wouldn’t be so missing. But even though something is missing in it, Lipsky’s book is still a marvelous evocation of that novel’s celebration and its author’s surprising (surely especially to him) lionization by the international literary community. His glorious exchanges with DFW were originally printed in Rolling Stone Magazine in 2008, as The Lost Years and Last Days of.
It has now become part of his received legend that DFW was the designated depressed person. His dispatches about his and our inner demons and his and our human frailties
were delivered with deceptive clarity and tenderness by this hulking tender beast of a brilliant writer. In fact, in Brief Interviews With Hideous Men from 1999, he veered perilously close to all out aberrant self-revelation (his usual modus operandi after all) in the second story, titled with appropriate irony, “The Depressed Person”, as per : ‘The depressed person was in terrible and unceasing emotional pain and the impossibility of sharing or articulating this pain was itself a component of the pain and a contributing factor in its essential horror.” (1) Fulfilled-dream syndrome: Mailer had it too, and Fitzgerald and Capote, and Hemingway.
But hold the phone, this particular depressed person was able to not only share and articulate but also diagnose and nearly heal upon reading and laughing with involuntary amazement, the many illusory and real sufferings to which humans are inclined. His was a voice that worked, outwardly at least, the kind of voice that materializes once in a rare while. Richard Brautigan was also such a voice from a generation earlier, and one who also succumbed to the same mis-interpretation of the consequences of his own insights, with the same dark self-homicidal results. Perhaps John Kennedy Toole, he of the posthumous Pulitzer for his lost Confederacy of Dunces, oops….he was yet another one of the early check-outs in the existential express lane with a minimum number of life-experiences to bag. Lipsky identified the check-out effect as one that has event gravity.
And at 31 he was even worse (as in sadder) than DFW, at 46. At least DFW managed to cram a whole literary life into his short corporeal one. While rhapsodizing about isolation, he has managed to produce a body of work that is scarily unified in its persistently blurred voices in he dark night of the soul. He was always telling us in the most up front manner possible that he was not long for these climes. Perhaps we thought he was being ironic with titles such as Suicide As A Kind Of Present ? or Everything And More: A Compact History of Infinity? or perhaps Death Is Not The End? Ironic, or documentary? Maybe life is just an accumulation of flukes after all, all misinterpreted.
As for example when he explains (again in The DP) that “Despairing then of describing the emotional pain or expressing its utter-ness to those around her, the depressed person instead described circumstances, both past and ongoing, which were somehow related to the pain, to its etiology and cause, hoping at least to be able to express to others something of the pain’s context, its—as it were—shape and texture.” (2). Isolation? But the System anointed him a Genius with its huge Macarthur Caress!
For some strange reason, DFW succumbed to an often entertained cultural contest between fiction and non-fiction which has historically focused erroneously on the notion that the meaning of life is supposedly being conveyed more effectively through fiction, rather than through anything that is other than fiction. This, of course, is but another cul-de sac. Blame Cervantes perhaps. In visual art this contest was also being played out as the wrestling match being drawing and colour for aesthetic supremacy. It’s a mug’s game. His life had already been embedded in his fiction, and his style was already opaquely memorial. It’s a pity he had to pit himself against this bipolar god of fiction versus fact, considering how blisteringly brilliant his so-called non-fiction is (such as of course, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again 1997, his first post-IJ work, or Consider The Lobster, 2005). When he is in his element he delivers top drawer personal journalism at the solo-ipsis archetypal level of Capote, Mailer, Updike, Cheever, Roth et al. Not to mention Hunter Thompson, oops…..another one bites the destiny.
DFW was working on his long awaited follow-up to Infinite Jest, entitled The Pale King, when his inner and outer demons got the better of him and he did a Phil Ochs-like swan-dive off our tenderly stricken movie set. But at least his erstwhile publisher Little Brown (which surely by now should be Big Brown?) has decided after due diligence to release his unfinished work with a clearly designated declaration that it is unfinished work. Broken bones of the novel have also been printed as “stories” over the last few years, but they were actually lost chapters in an impossible to finish fictional chimera.
Given the authorial roots of style on display by DFW all along, which originate as far back as Laurence Sterne for instance, and whose work when it is finished is so quintessentially unfinished anyway, a la 1759's Tristram Shandy for example, it thus makes perfect sense to approach and review The Pale King even before it is released in its prematurely skeletal form. Perhaps especially since the meaning of life was already clearly embedded in pages 492 and 997 of Infinite Jest. True, the same meaning was found in Dostovevsky and Faulkner, but then that’s the odd thing about meanings, isn’t it.
Therefore we now know what to expect from DFW’s The Pale King, since part of that same meaning apparently caused the mercurial Wallace to check-out whispering sweet nothings in late 2008. But perhaps he should have listened to the asthmatic cough of Baudelaire more carefully: life is a hospital where the patients are all obsessed with changing our beds. The subject of The Pale King apparently is boredom. After the swampy depths of delirium so expertly explored Girl With The Curious Hair, his second book in 1989, after which he checked himself voluntarily into a protective custody ward where they conducted ongoing suicide watches, boredom may be an improvement of sorts. Indeed, it does contain some of his most disturbing and disturbed writing. Kafka, Beckett, Celine, Burroughs, Kerouac, Barth, Hawkes, Robbe-Grillet….it’s a crowded and nightmarish alley. But it’s still one just chock-filled with yucks and boffos, even after all these years. He was in such good company in his own territory, once he had staked it out.
As a matter of fact, since poor DFW is now a ghost, or a fictional character, he could even Himself join that little gathering on the balcony, and with red bandanna in hand (in preparation for any untoward perspiration) he could hold forth while all the gentleman in question bring to bear on the question the particular perspective of their own personal authorial creators. Here then, the question, as Antonin A. used to intone it. A spontaneous seminar class in the sociology of suffering (a specialty of Haller’s), presided over by DFW, being honored as the youngest and saddest member of the assembly present:
Now guys, this may sound like self-help for solipsists but I’ll say it anyway….sorry I’m already sweating so much…..why thank you Hans, I’d love another schnapps yes…..I’ll say it anyway, or rather I’ll quote it anyway: “Circumstances are difficult only for those who draw back from the tomb. Virtue Reclaimed. As usual, the ignoble Marquis was quite correct. A eulogy for ourselves then....or at least a eulogy for our history of ourselves. What a charming idea. And who better to write it?” Well, DFW was certainly a man of his---
All along, DFW was writing his eulogy right in front of our (very) eyes. He had already decided perhaps ages ago, it now seems, maybe even when he was 10 years old or something like that. Mailer described it (the future travails of young DFW) like this when sharing the process leading to his own Barbary Shore, three years after his grand NATD breakthrough: how the book “emerged from the bombarded cellars of my unconscious: an agonized eye of a novel which tried to find some amalgam of my recent experiences and the larger horror of that world which might be preparing to destroy itself…..it has in its high fevers a kind of insane insight into the psychic mysteries of our time…it has the air of our time, authority and nihilism stalking one another in the orgiastic hollow of this century….” 3) Sounds like it was written yesterday by Mr. Lipsky on DFW. I didn’t mind Mr. Lipsky as much as Mr. Mason did in NYR of Books.
Mailer’s above Note From The Author first appeared in the “second advertisement”, called Barbary Shore, from Advertisements For Myself, 1959, the book which is most similar to DFW’s own oratorical self-eulogizing style. It is his best and my favourite. Only Nietzsche self-eulogized more than either DFW or Mailer for god’s sake. And all I’m asking for is an explanation, after all, as someone who seems to have developed a bit of an appetite for the strangely-spiced dish he specializes in concocting. Just a simple explanation. I’m less interested in analyzing or discussing how and why DFW wrote, since I also never analyze the sacred solos of either Charlie Parker or Jimi Hendrix, and they likewise just happen perfectly all by themselves, just as DFW’s most poetic prose does, such as his Mailer-like assessment of the time of his own time (1999) in On His Deathbed, Holding Your Hand: “Do not consign me. Be my bell. Unworthy life for all thee. Beg. Not to die in this appalling silence. This charged and pregnant vacuum all around. This wet and open sucking hole beneath that eye. That terrible eye impending. Such silence.” 4)
So, we know how good he was (that above snippet may as well have been late Beckett), we know how well he wrote and with what degree of deceptive ease he thought and spoke, but we should all be far, far less interested in any of that then in why he stopped. Or even worse (as in sadder), why he thought he had to stop. Perhaps it was a notion he explored all to well in his terminally interminable surrealist therapeutic bromide The Broom of The System: that meaning is use, and if usefulness is absent then so is meaning. So, if his ostensible purpose, that of writing reports from the front, no longer existed, then wasn’t his own existence also called into question? He himself had no use (he imagined) since he couldn’t write anymore, therefore he had no meaning, or even less than what he already thought he didn’t have? So is meaning found in purpose then?
Lipsky’s own synopsis of the entropy curve is scary in its lucidity, almost suggesting that DFW lived his life at some sort of quantum field emotional level (ie: the light than burns brightest lasts only half as long): “His life was a map that ends at the wrong destination. He was an A student, played football, played tennis, wrote a philosophy thesis and a novel before he graduated from Amherst, he went to writing school, published the novel, made a city of squalling, bruising, kneecapping editors fall mooney-eyed in love with him. He published a thousand page novel, received the only award you get in the nation for being a genius, wrote essays providing the best feel anywhere of what it means to be alive now, accepted a special chair to teach writing at a college in California, married, published another book, and hanged himself at age forty-six.” 5)
In terms of public meltdowns, his career arc was perhaps most scarily similar to the British blues musician Peter Green, the gifted but troubled founder of the band Fleetwood Mac, whose sudden success (they outsold The Beatles in 1970) was so intolerable, and his private doubts so grandiose that he skidded off the shared road altogether, ending up working as a gravedigger while his band-mates went on to conquer both the audience and the cash register to a blockbuster degree. In his own field, DFW was also similar to another talented young writer in that regard, F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose early fame was also followed by what he himself referred to as a “crack up” under the weight of early celebrity, over-indulgence and dark self-doubt.
Why did DFW stop writing? He didn’t. Writing stopped him. Soon after he stopped taking a certain anti-depressant called Nardil. In many respects that wall-hitting was also most similar to another large scale American male-liver/writer/dier, now Grandpapa Hemingway, in his own time quite a radical literary voice, and still utterly unique. He too was stopped by writing. In fact the number of writers who are stopped by writing and who eliminate their own actual characters is/was quite vertiginous: Zweig, Woolf, Thompson, Sexton, Kosinksi, Levi, Brautigan, de Nerval, Crane, Crevel, Crosby, Hemingway, Debord, Koestler, Inge, Mann, Mishima, Plath. Each of them were murdered by the books they could no longer write. And what is writer’s block after all, but disenchantment with the process of being written by the books you claim to write? If you have a friend on the AD’s, tell them to continue on, no matter what.
And since we will now no longer be receiving any further reports from his stilled voice, some people believe that it’s fit and proper to release as much of what we already have but have not yet read as possible. I’m not so sure. And I’m sure that DFW is not so sure. Expecting the sad fragments of his The Pale King is one thing, I’m up for that, since so much of his best bulk work was so often sent out in tiny epistles like literary canaries in the cultural mines via magazines and journals. But do we really need to have coming, in 2011 also, Fate Time and Language: An Essay on Free Will, which is an adaptation of DFW’s undergraduate thesis in Philosophy at Amherst, originally titled Fatalism and the Semantics of Physical Modality ? I don’t think so. No, not really.
On the other hand, DFW’s address to a commencement of students at Kenyon College in 2005, This Is Water: Some Thoughts Delivered on a Significant Occasion about Living The Compassionate Life, deserves to be widely distributed since it is emblematic of his obvious and acclaimed skill as a teacher of young people, and especially of young writers, who will now sorely miss his horrifying presence on the literary scene. He made everyone else better.
But what were we able to learn from DFW in his short 46 year sojourn amongst us?
Well, it’s like this. We learned that we are all mostly entropy in a suitcase, that our time is always almost up, yet we persist in lingering in order to tell our story, our stories, and we eventually discover that all we are is stories, that we are characters in search of something we know not what, who would if we could but we cannot we know, and my my, how time flies. And that was merely the lesson of his first tentative salvo, The Broom of The System. As usual, DFW put it best , in a 1993 exchange with Larry McCaffery:
“These are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is? In dark times, the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of what’s human and magical that still live and glow despite the times’ darkness.” A hard lesson to learn.
We learn that often, rumination causes in us a humorous sadness. Musing on works after the physical, the metaphysical, induces an amusing melancholy. The meta-world just past the edge of the physical (about which he now knows a few things he didn’t before), and about which much can be surmised but little can be confirmed, while being excessively tantalizing though unyielding in its stubborn silence, remains a mere emblem of the enigma. There are of course, many emblems of the enigma but there is only one enigma. DFW’s notions about the meta-novel are now quite relevant to his current experiences in the metaphysical realms. I hope he brought his notebook along with him.
The nutshell story of this gifted nutcase is tenderly expressed by his sister Amy Wallace, and even more succinctly than Lipsky’s guy-pal version: “Interviewers were coming asking what David was like. But the questions always circled back to the same anxious ground. His phobias and low points. My own anxieties are many. My brother was a hilarious guy, a quirky generous spirit, who happened to be a genius and also suffer from depression.” 6) She also suggests that he may have kissed his dogs on the mouth and said he was sorry before hanging himself.
The meaning of life is that it ends. But the purpose of life is not to let it. A sudden ray of light emerges from the gloom: life is thematic, it isn’t really chronological at all. And so is DFW’s big book. This is one of the secrets the book reveals. It has a section at the back which outlines the chapters chronologically, if so desired, but the book itself proceeds according to thematic segments. The way actual real life does. The book flows according to procedures for a well-timed ending. Just the way DFW’s own story flowed, as it turns out. The Obtuse Ovid does it again!
What he left us contained the message that at such a terminal point, opposites cease to be contradictions. We have been manufactured by fiction to serve reality. That’s what some of his poetry taught us. A kindred realm of silence, gesture and immobility. One is forced to keep perfectly still out of the quite logical compulsion to witness the slow erosion of the dream. The dream decays before our dreaming eyes, it evaporates, and suddenly there comes an end to all surmise. And after all, who in such a situation would want to hazard conjectures about the future? Thus spake Incandenza.
Hans Castorp moves to rise from his chair and decides against it, choosing instead to pour a fourteenth schnapps; Ulrich has been scanning the mountainous horizon as if looking for hot-air balloons; Harry Haller has become considerable smaller and seems to be on the verge of shrinking away altogether; Gwyon has made a fateful decision to return to the clergy, but in a more monastic form; Benny Profane has been the busiest of them all during DFW’s scintillating diatribe, rehearsing his own next sequence of yo-yo moves across the snow-capped mountains; and only Hal Incandenza seems slightly melancholy, knowing that he will soon be pressed into duty (expected Spring 2011) as a character with a different name, acting out his author’s insightful whims throughout all or most of The Pale King. And he knows that that one is unfinished, just like he was. Just like the author was. And he just sighs that sigh that all created characters must sigh: that sigh that is so clearly outlined in all of their contracts. Near the bottom, in the author’s blood.
Before I encountered the Lipsky road trip book on DFW, I knew him only as one of over 400 writers who have killed themselves over the years (don’t even ask about the list of literary critics who did so). Since then, I’ve read all the books this poor brilliant slob left to us (except for Everything And More, which after having read so much DFW I can now proudly say that I have a phobia about mathematics that’s he’s more than welcome to try to cure). Most of it is amazing. Some of it is horrifying. All of it is captivating in its
bravery and audacity.
Girl With Curious Hair, Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, and Oblivion are great collections of utterly sick stories, and A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again and Consider The Lobster are great collections of utterly sane essays. But it’s his big second novel, Infinite Jest, that reveals the surprising meaning: that life is thematic and not chronological or sequential. The Pale King? I don’t want to. But I will. Because he wrote it.
In the end, it’s not just that life ends, well-timed or not, that provides meaning to its obscure passage, but rather that it is temporary in the first place, that it is temporal and unfolds in time, on time. And also that none of us know, as per the sad but still inspiring case of DFW, just how long or short that temporariness actually might be. John Updike, one of the elder statesmen in the difficult and demanding field of DFW, and one who, like Roth and Mailer, was able to keep on writing book after book long after his initial early celebrity binge, has commented somewhere that things being brief, temporary, conditional, provisional or contingent shouldn’t necessarily disqualify them. It’s the same with great writers. Sometimes, there’s just something missing.
*
Infinite Regress. The ancients defined knowledge as justified true belief. Justification was providing some reasons, a rational explanation for the belief. True opinion accompanied by reason is knowledge. The infinite regress arises when we ask what are the justifications for the reasons themselves. If the reasons count as knowledge, they must be justified with reasons for the reasons, and reasons for those reasons. This leads the skeptic to suspension of judgment. They [skeptics] hand down also two other modes leading to suspension of judgment. Since every object of apprehension seems to be apprehended either through itself or through another object, by showing that nothing is apprehended either through itself or through another thing, they introduce doubt, as they suppose, about everything.
That nothing is apprehended through itself is plain, they say, from the controversy which exists amongst the physicists regarding, I imagine, all things, both sensibles and intelligibles; which controversy admits of no settlement because we can neither employ a sensible nor an intelligible criterion, since every criterion we may adopt is controverted and therefore discredited. And the reason why they do not allow that anything is apprehended through something else is this: If that through which an object is apprehended must always itself be apprehended through some other thing, one is involved in a process of circular reasoning or in regress ad infinitum.
The whole historical phenomenon of infinite regress is ideally suited to the barely hidden mathematical genius of DFW in every aspect of his novelistic and journalistic observations. That is his special gift: having this astonishing power of observation and this amazing power of description, rarely combined in one writer, living or dead. It would be a moment best summed up visually in the SA metaphor of the balcony of discourse, a conference of the clouds: every individual in the SA metaphor has something missing. That was what made and makes them all so special. We also have something missing. We identify. They are our surrogates living at the edges of emotional extremis. They cater our dreams and nightmares. They tell us the stories that we would have discovered for ourselves if only we had been brave enough or smart enough to do so.
That observation is also at the heart of the recent review of David Lipsky’s book on
DFW, “Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Who You Are: A Road Trip With David Foster Wallace”. Although I understand the perspective of Wyatt Mason in his New York Review of Books piece on DFW, perfectly titled, “Smarter Than You Think”,
I think he may have misinterpreted both the strategy employed by Lipsky to trick DFW (a very difficult and disturbed savant) into talking freely, as well as the strategy employed by DFW for daily survival on earth, one which now must perhaps be called into question.
Wyatt Mason put it very well when he was busy taking Lipsky and DFW to task: “The story “Good Old Neon” in Oblivion is not a Dostoyeskian ten-page monologue by someone trying to decide whether to commit suicide; rather, it is a forty-page monologue by someone who has committed suicide, and who would explain not so much how he could have come to such an end as what we mean when we say someone takes his life, and what such a taking leaves us—what the moments we’re left with might be able to contain. All Wallace’s formal ingenuity would have been for naught if he hadn’t been intent on using those forms to probe at the most injured parts of being.” 7)
This is of course as brilliant as it is poignant. Hemingway took his life. Virginia Woolf took her life. I believe their books took their lives. They took back their lives, but only after first giving them to us through their works. This is the most touching thing about Mason’s remark…. “what the moments we’re left with might be able to contain” and “what such a taking leaves us”. So, what are we left with? Something that amounts to an SA moment: what Hans Castorp in The Magic Mountain called a necessary science that yet to be invented, the sociology of suffering.
But of course, this current examination, somewhat of a prolegomenon, is about much more than DFW solely, it is in fact just as much about John Hawkes and William Gaddis and the American voice in general. A vernacular voice that also includes another primary DFW precedent, Herman Melville, most especially in his under-read The Confidence Man, from 1857, but most obviously in the titanic Moby Dick as an aesthetic a precursor. If IJ is anything, and it is many things, it is also a black shadow of that white whale. Needless to say, The Pale King is even more of an apt white whale image, the “big book” that Mailer eventually delivered with Ancient Evenings, perhaps, in 1983, a full 35 years after NATD. But it took DFW down the same way Ahab was enmeshed in the harpoon ropes and ended up sailing away with Moby, down to the bottom of the sea in the John Huston film version. Down to depths that even he probably couldn’t write about.
But one could also include Henry Roth or Harper Lee on that claustrophobic shortlist. And why was a tough old buzzard like William Styron able to overcome his inner demons and survive, even after writing a personal memoir about his depression called Darkness Visible and yet still go on to be 81 when he died of natural causes (such as not hanging, drowning or shooting yourself)? Whereas a young tough dude like DFW was not able to do so. Perhaps if he had addressed his depression directly in writing rather than in the coded ciphers that literally riddle his works he may have been able to overcome the black capsizing wave. Instead he embedded his feelings in a complex mythology of fiction versus fact versus nightmare, a battle ultimately won tidily by nightmare.
Similar ventures into the realm of dark laughter are of course legion, from Swift and Sterne onward but perhaps especially so in postwar American fiction. John Hawkes, one of the writers, along with Bill Gaddis, who most resonate through the crystalline vernacular voice of DFW, was engaged in a similar tag-team wrestling match with the history of literature and the history of doubt. And of course all of them toil in the huge modernist shadow cast by Joyce and others of his scope and scale. They are born ambitious, apparently.
Leslie A. Fiedler was one of the great advocates for both modernist literature and the
importance of literature in life generally, and in his prime he explored the precursors and their inheritors with an acute sense that the generation of writers that followed by modernists would be even more demanding and challenging. He was of course, both prescient and correct. In his masterful 1960 opus Love and Death in The American Novel, he managed to isolate and analyze several of the key subjects and issues inherent to the American literary voice, with particular emphasis on the curious obsession with depression and death that seems to haunt the American idiom.
One of the most accomplished yet least publicly known of visionary voices is John Hawkes, whose first novel in 1949, The Cannibal, cast a long shadow across a literary landscape which had naturally no inkling of the postmodern condition that would soon follow in a mere twenty years. This salvo was then followed in quick succession with: The Beetle Leg, The Lime Twig, The Blood Oranges, Second Skin, Travesty and The Passion Artist. Hawkes was therefore writing in a tongue that had yet to be created, precisely like other grand heretics such as Sterne and Kafka. Hawkes was therefore, like all heretics, living and working in advance of a broken myth.
Fiedler was doubly prescient when he wrote in the introduction to Hawkes’ The Lime Twig: “Everyone klnows that in our literature the age of experimentalism is over and an age of recapitulation has begun; and few of us, I suspect, really regret it. John Hawes neither rewrites nor recapitulates, and therefore, spares us neither terror nor truth. John Hawkes has managed both and is perhaps, after the publication of three books and on the verge of a fourth, is the least read novelist of substantial merit in the United States.” 8) He is also the direct precursor of a DFW, but ironically DFW would garner for the same kind of dark comedy a massive accidentally mainstream popular audience, something inconceivable for a Hawkes, or even a Pynchon.
He could also have been describing DFW in fact fifty years ago, when Fielder characterizes the contemporary literary dilemma this way: “Counterfeits of insanity (automatic writing, the scrawls of the drunk and doped) are finally boring; while the compositions of the actually insane are in the end merely documents, terrible and depressing. Hawkes gives us neither of these surrenders to unreason but rather reason’s last desperate attempt to know what unreason is; and in such knowledge there are possibilities not only for poetry and power but for pleasure as well.” 9)
This is anticipatory, visionary thinking in action, and in DFW, this notion is writ large in all his work, but especially in IJ, where that pesky meaning has been embedded, almost like a fossil, in the soil of his feverish imaginings. Or was it reportage? The fact is there is very little difference between the spirit and structure of his essays and the spirit and structure of his fiction, which makes his self-perceived unsurmountable problem all the more deplorable, all the more sad, all the more entertaining for all of us trying to fathom just what is contained in what he left us with when he took his life back and away.
And what is contained in what he left us? A cautionary tale warning against the dangers of literary solipsism, among other things, and for that matter, existential solipsism in everyday life, to which the author eventually surrendered. This position is most often confused with those Faustian themes that fuel most modernist styles as well as those that emerged afterward and needed to disguise themselves in something slightly more diverse and less monolithic.
In “The Power of Blackness: Faustian Man and the Cult of Violence,” from Love and Death in the American Novel, in 1966 (written when DFW was four years old) Fiedler discusses the idea of despair in Melville's works, asserting that Melville's style changed from gothic to romantic as his career progressed. He asserted that the reality of damnation he never denied; but the meaning of it, for one committed to a skeptical and secular view, he questioned. Especially in his later works, he presented the “mystery of iniquity” in such complexly ironical contexts that the wariest of readers is occasionally baffled.
Nevertheless, he kept faith throughout his fiction not only with the gothic vision in general, but with the Faustian theme. Likewise DFW would embrace damnation and the doom of a dark tragic comedy and he would similarly move from postmodern angst to a neo-baroque style while also exploring complexly ironical context which needless to say often baffles his readers. Or perhaps he only baffles people before they become his readers, since like most aspects of life, there are two kinds of people in the world: those who enjoy DFW and those who do not. Of course, there are also two other kinds of people in the world, those who think the world is divided into two kinds of people and those who do not.
Donald Brackett is a Toronto-based culture critic. He has published numerous articles essays and reviews, and two books on the dynamics of creative collaboration: one on Fleetwood Mac and one on the pathology singer-songwriters from Bob Dylan to Jack White. He is currently working on a book length study of the parallels between William Gaddis and David Foster Wallace, and the politics of writer’s block. He also teaches a cultural anthropology course with the Ontario College of Art and Design University in Toronto, and lectures on cultural history and theory at Innis College, U. of T.
Writing About Writing and Not Writing
BY DONALD BRACKETT
"There is something missing....if I knew what it is then it wouldn't be so missing..."
Han, in The Recognitions, by William Gaddis, 1955
It has recently come to my attention that the meaning of life can be found in the 1996 novel by the late American author David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest. I can indeed confirm this, even though it is a delayed realization of some fifteen perplexed years. There are a number of explanations for why it took so long to realize that the meaning of life is easily found in Infinite Jest (page 492, to be exact) but those would not add anything salient to this basic empirical fact. The meaning of life also recurs on page 997 as well, as if for some sort of echo-effect that manages to reassure the astute reader that indeed, he or she is on the right track after all. But just where does that track lead? Did DFW find out? If so, after visiting from 1962-2008, he is regrettably no longer able to file his remarkable reports from the front. Or has he only gone on to the actual front? “One never knew, after all, now did one now, did one now did one.” As he himself said in the “radically condensed history of post-industrial life” from his Brief Interview With Hideous Men, 2007. Late late Wallace.
If one could envisage a large balcony jutting off a big old ornate building somewhere in the Swiss Alps (SA), with obscurely wounded inmates lounging on large deck chairs bundled in thick blankets and conversing about the meaning of life in each of their own distinct accents or dialects, then one could probably see that Harry Haller is there from the novel Steppenwolf, Hans Castorp is there from The Magic Mountain (he is their genial host in fact), Ulrich is there from The Man Without Qualities, Gwyon is there from The Recognitions, Benny Profane is there from Pynchon's V.,…should Salinger or…..God no, who wants to listen to Holden with his constant cringing and whining? Certainly not gentlemen of the caliber of Haller, Castorp and Ulrich. Old world, you know. He could always sit with Profane I suppose. After all, it’s a community of shadows of their former selves, or of their authors.
And of course, Hal Incandenza’s maker himself is also there from Infinite Jest. He looks tired. And why not, his was one hell of a ride. Blood-shot eyes that only his loving dogs Jeeves and Drone (or Bella and Warner) truly understand. His own personal V. was the under-read and over-written gem The Broom of the System in 1987, with Infinite Jest being an apparently obvious Gravity’s Rainbow-scaled achievement. At first glance.
But the remarkable thing is that the hyper-intelligent DFW, whose frenetic literary voice is already sorely missed, was not quite ever able to do what even a brilliant genius-thug like Norman Mailer was able to do: follow up the first astonishing salvo with a second barrage of brilliance: or in his case, pull off the great second follow-up novel and then hit the jackpot with a third that surpasses it. Mailer even explained himself eloquently in the opening introduction to Barbary Shore as someone desperate to prove that The Naked and The Dead had not been the full measure of all his talent at once, a one-shot deal. Not to mention The Deer Park or his masterpiece, Advertisements For Myself.
Surpass Infinite Jest though? You see, it has to be Infinite Jest that is considered DFW’s Naked and The Dead, see? Because The Broom of The System was nowhere near as gigantic a household name as IJ (incredibly enough given its girth), and since it went by relatively unnoticed by the mass reading audience, it was not something to even be surpassed. Therein lies the dilemma. Which is why such an effort on DFW’s part invariably leads to infinite regress: that foggy cul-de-sac in the overcrowded city of thoughts devoted to searching for origins and authenticity. Where there is none. Perfect for the math-sodden wretch who wrote Everything and More. Though at least in deference to his considerable and profound gifts, we can certainly say that he did manage to produce a whirlwind of non-novelistic writings that remain equally incandescent, pun intended, so called non-fiction essays that stand in counterbalance to his two and a half novels.
There have been some excellent appreciations of this talented writer’s work, the most notable of which was David Lipsky’s recent and remarkable Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, but there is something missing in the portrait that unfolds itself through his shimmering conversations with the late author while on a book publicity tour. If I knew what was missing, then it wouldn’t be so missing. But even though something is missing in it, Lipsky’s book is still a marvelous evocation of that novel’s celebration and its author’s surprising (surely especially to him) lionization by the international literary community. His glorious exchanges with DFW were originally printed in Rolling Stone Magazine in 2008, as The Lost Years and Last Days of.
It has now become part of his received legend that DFW was the designated depressed person. His dispatches about his and our inner demons and his and our human frailties
were delivered with deceptive clarity and tenderness by this hulking tender beast of a brilliant writer. In fact, in Brief Interviews With Hideous Men from 1999, he veered perilously close to all out aberrant self-revelation (his usual modus operandi after all) in the second story, titled with appropriate irony, “The Depressed Person”, as per : ‘The depressed person was in terrible and unceasing emotional pain and the impossibility of sharing or articulating this pain was itself a component of the pain and a contributing factor in its essential horror.” (1) Fulfilled-dream syndrome: Mailer had it too, and Fitzgerald and Capote, and Hemingway.
But hold the phone, this particular depressed person was able to not only share and articulate but also diagnose and nearly heal upon reading and laughing with involuntary amazement, the many illusory and real sufferings to which humans are inclined. His was a voice that worked, outwardly at least, the kind of voice that materializes once in a rare while. Richard Brautigan was also such a voice from a generation earlier, and one who also succumbed to the same mis-interpretation of the consequences of his own insights, with the same dark self-homicidal results. Perhaps John Kennedy Toole, he of the posthumous Pulitzer for his lost Confederacy of Dunces, oops….he was yet another one of the early check-outs in the existential express lane with a minimum number of life-experiences to bag. Lipsky identified the check-out effect as one that has event gravity.
And at 31 he was even worse (as in sadder) than DFW, at 46. At least DFW managed to cram a whole literary life into his short corporeal one. While rhapsodizing about isolation, he has managed to produce a body of work that is scarily unified in its persistently blurred voices in he dark night of the soul. He was always telling us in the most up front manner possible that he was not long for these climes. Perhaps we thought he was being ironic with titles such as Suicide As A Kind Of Present ? or Everything And More: A Compact History of Infinity? or perhaps Death Is Not The End? Ironic, or documentary? Maybe life is just an accumulation of flukes after all, all misinterpreted.
As for example when he explains (again in The DP) that “Despairing then of describing the emotional pain or expressing its utter-ness to those around her, the depressed person instead described circumstances, both past and ongoing, which were somehow related to the pain, to its etiology and cause, hoping at least to be able to express to others something of the pain’s context, its—as it were—shape and texture.” (2). Isolation? But the System anointed him a Genius with its huge Macarthur Caress!
For some strange reason, DFW succumbed to an often entertained cultural contest between fiction and non-fiction which has historically focused erroneously on the notion that the meaning of life is supposedly being conveyed more effectively through fiction, rather than through anything that is other than fiction. This, of course, is but another cul-de sac. Blame Cervantes perhaps. In visual art this contest was also being played out as the wrestling match being drawing and colour for aesthetic supremacy. It’s a mug’s game. His life had already been embedded in his fiction, and his style was already opaquely memorial. It’s a pity he had to pit himself against this bipolar god of fiction versus fact, considering how blisteringly brilliant his so-called non-fiction is (such as of course, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again 1997, his first post-IJ work, or Consider The Lobster, 2005). When he is in his element he delivers top drawer personal journalism at the solo-ipsis archetypal level of Capote, Mailer, Updike, Cheever, Roth et al. Not to mention Hunter Thompson, oops…..another one bites the destiny.
DFW was working on his long awaited follow-up to Infinite Jest, entitled The Pale King, when his inner and outer demons got the better of him and he did a Phil Ochs-like swan-dive off our tenderly stricken movie set. But at least his erstwhile publisher Little Brown (which surely by now should be Big Brown?) has decided after due diligence to release his unfinished work with a clearly designated declaration that it is unfinished work. Broken bones of the novel have also been printed as “stories” over the last few years, but they were actually lost chapters in an impossible to finish fictional chimera.
Given the authorial roots of style on display by DFW all along, which originate as far back as Laurence Sterne for instance, and whose work when it is finished is so quintessentially unfinished anyway, a la 1759's Tristram Shandy for example, it thus makes perfect sense to approach and review The Pale King even before it is released in its prematurely skeletal form. Perhaps especially since the meaning of life was already clearly embedded in pages 492 and 997 of Infinite Jest. True, the same meaning was found in Dostovevsky and Faulkner, but then that’s the odd thing about meanings, isn’t it.
Therefore we now know what to expect from DFW’s The Pale King, since part of that same meaning apparently caused the mercurial Wallace to check-out whispering sweet nothings in late 2008. But perhaps he should have listened to the asthmatic cough of Baudelaire more carefully: life is a hospital where the patients are all obsessed with changing our beds. The subject of The Pale King apparently is boredom. After the swampy depths of delirium so expertly explored Girl With The Curious Hair, his second book in 1989, after which he checked himself voluntarily into a protective custody ward where they conducted ongoing suicide watches, boredom may be an improvement of sorts. Indeed, it does contain some of his most disturbing and disturbed writing. Kafka, Beckett, Celine, Burroughs, Kerouac, Barth, Hawkes, Robbe-Grillet….it’s a crowded and nightmarish alley. But it’s still one just chock-filled with yucks and boffos, even after all these years. He was in such good company in his own territory, once he had staked it out.
As a matter of fact, since poor DFW is now a ghost, or a fictional character, he could even Himself join that little gathering on the balcony, and with red bandanna in hand (in preparation for any untoward perspiration) he could hold forth while all the gentleman in question bring to bear on the question the particular perspective of their own personal authorial creators. Here then, the question, as Antonin A. used to intone it. A spontaneous seminar class in the sociology of suffering (a specialty of Haller’s), presided over by DFW, being honored as the youngest and saddest member of the assembly present:
Now guys, this may sound like self-help for solipsists but I’ll say it anyway….sorry I’m already sweating so much…..why thank you Hans, I’d love another schnapps yes…..I’ll say it anyway, or rather I’ll quote it anyway: “Circumstances are difficult only for those who draw back from the tomb. Virtue Reclaimed. As usual, the ignoble Marquis was quite correct. A eulogy for ourselves then....or at least a eulogy for our history of ourselves. What a charming idea. And who better to write it?” Well, DFW was certainly a man of his---
All along, DFW was writing his eulogy right in front of our (very) eyes. He had already decided perhaps ages ago, it now seems, maybe even when he was 10 years old or something like that. Mailer described it (the future travails of young DFW) like this when sharing the process leading to his own Barbary Shore, three years after his grand NATD breakthrough: how the book “emerged from the bombarded cellars of my unconscious: an agonized eye of a novel which tried to find some amalgam of my recent experiences and the larger horror of that world which might be preparing to destroy itself…..it has in its high fevers a kind of insane insight into the psychic mysteries of our time…it has the air of our time, authority and nihilism stalking one another in the orgiastic hollow of this century….” 3) Sounds like it was written yesterday by Mr. Lipsky on DFW. I didn’t mind Mr. Lipsky as much as Mr. Mason did in NYR of Books.
Mailer’s above Note From The Author first appeared in the “second advertisement”, called Barbary Shore, from Advertisements For Myself, 1959, the book which is most similar to DFW’s own oratorical self-eulogizing style. It is his best and my favourite. Only Nietzsche self-eulogized more than either DFW or Mailer for god’s sake. And all I’m asking for is an explanation, after all, as someone who seems to have developed a bit of an appetite for the strangely-spiced dish he specializes in concocting. Just a simple explanation. I’m less interested in analyzing or discussing how and why DFW wrote, since I also never analyze the sacred solos of either Charlie Parker or Jimi Hendrix, and they likewise just happen perfectly all by themselves, just as DFW’s most poetic prose does, such as his Mailer-like assessment of the time of his own time (1999) in On His Deathbed, Holding Your Hand: “Do not consign me. Be my bell. Unworthy life for all thee. Beg. Not to die in this appalling silence. This charged and pregnant vacuum all around. This wet and open sucking hole beneath that eye. That terrible eye impending. Such silence.” 4)
So, we know how good he was (that above snippet may as well have been late Beckett), we know how well he wrote and with what degree of deceptive ease he thought and spoke, but we should all be far, far less interested in any of that then in why he stopped. Or even worse (as in sadder), why he thought he had to stop. Perhaps it was a notion he explored all to well in his terminally interminable surrealist therapeutic bromide The Broom of The System: that meaning is use, and if usefulness is absent then so is meaning. So, if his ostensible purpose, that of writing reports from the front, no longer existed, then wasn’t his own existence also called into question? He himself had no use (he imagined) since he couldn’t write anymore, therefore he had no meaning, or even less than what he already thought he didn’t have? So is meaning found in purpose then?
Lipsky’s own synopsis of the entropy curve is scary in its lucidity, almost suggesting that DFW lived his life at some sort of quantum field emotional level (ie: the light than burns brightest lasts only half as long): “His life was a map that ends at the wrong destination. He was an A student, played football, played tennis, wrote a philosophy thesis and a novel before he graduated from Amherst, he went to writing school, published the novel, made a city of squalling, bruising, kneecapping editors fall mooney-eyed in love with him. He published a thousand page novel, received the only award you get in the nation for being a genius, wrote essays providing the best feel anywhere of what it means to be alive now, accepted a special chair to teach writing at a college in California, married, published another book, and hanged himself at age forty-six.” 5)
In terms of public meltdowns, his career arc was perhaps most scarily similar to the British blues musician Peter Green, the gifted but troubled founder of the band Fleetwood Mac, whose sudden success (they outsold The Beatles in 1970) was so intolerable, and his private doubts so grandiose that he skidded off the shared road altogether, ending up working as a gravedigger while his band-mates went on to conquer both the audience and the cash register to a blockbuster degree. In his own field, DFW was also similar to another talented young writer in that regard, F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose early fame was also followed by what he himself referred to as a “crack up” under the weight of early celebrity, over-indulgence and dark self-doubt.
Why did DFW stop writing? He didn’t. Writing stopped him. Soon after he stopped taking a certain anti-depressant called Nardil. In many respects that wall-hitting was also most similar to another large scale American male-liver/writer/dier, now Grandpapa Hemingway, in his own time quite a radical literary voice, and still utterly unique. He too was stopped by writing. In fact the number of writers who are stopped by writing and who eliminate their own actual characters is/was quite vertiginous: Zweig, Woolf, Thompson, Sexton, Kosinksi, Levi, Brautigan, de Nerval, Crane, Crevel, Crosby, Hemingway, Debord, Koestler, Inge, Mann, Mishima, Plath. Each of them were murdered by the books they could no longer write. And what is writer’s block after all, but disenchantment with the process of being written by the books you claim to write? If you have a friend on the AD’s, tell them to continue on, no matter what.
And since we will now no longer be receiving any further reports from his stilled voice, some people believe that it’s fit and proper to release as much of what we already have but have not yet read as possible. I’m not so sure. And I’m sure that DFW is not so sure. Expecting the sad fragments of his The Pale King is one thing, I’m up for that, since so much of his best bulk work was so often sent out in tiny epistles like literary canaries in the cultural mines via magazines and journals. But do we really need to have coming, in 2011 also, Fate Time and Language: An Essay on Free Will, which is an adaptation of DFW’s undergraduate thesis in Philosophy at Amherst, originally titled Fatalism and the Semantics of Physical Modality ? I don’t think so. No, not really.
On the other hand, DFW’s address to a commencement of students at Kenyon College in 2005, This Is Water: Some Thoughts Delivered on a Significant Occasion about Living The Compassionate Life, deserves to be widely distributed since it is emblematic of his obvious and acclaimed skill as a teacher of young people, and especially of young writers, who will now sorely miss his horrifying presence on the literary scene. He made everyone else better.
But what were we able to learn from DFW in his short 46 year sojourn amongst us?
Well, it’s like this. We learned that we are all mostly entropy in a suitcase, that our time is always almost up, yet we persist in lingering in order to tell our story, our stories, and we eventually discover that all we are is stories, that we are characters in search of something we know not what, who would if we could but we cannot we know, and my my, how time flies. And that was merely the lesson of his first tentative salvo, The Broom of The System. As usual, DFW put it best , in a 1993 exchange with Larry McCaffery:
“These are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is? In dark times, the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of what’s human and magical that still live and glow despite the times’ darkness.” A hard lesson to learn.
We learn that often, rumination causes in us a humorous sadness. Musing on works after the physical, the metaphysical, induces an amusing melancholy. The meta-world just past the edge of the physical (about which he now knows a few things he didn’t before), and about which much can be surmised but little can be confirmed, while being excessively tantalizing though unyielding in its stubborn silence, remains a mere emblem of the enigma. There are of course, many emblems of the enigma but there is only one enigma. DFW’s notions about the meta-novel are now quite relevant to his current experiences in the metaphysical realms. I hope he brought his notebook along with him.
The nutshell story of this gifted nutcase is tenderly expressed by his sister Amy Wallace, and even more succinctly than Lipsky’s guy-pal version: “Interviewers were coming asking what David was like. But the questions always circled back to the same anxious ground. His phobias and low points. My own anxieties are many. My brother was a hilarious guy, a quirky generous spirit, who happened to be a genius and also suffer from depression.” 6) She also suggests that he may have kissed his dogs on the mouth and said he was sorry before hanging himself.
The meaning of life is that it ends. But the purpose of life is not to let it. A sudden ray of light emerges from the gloom: life is thematic, it isn’t really chronological at all. And so is DFW’s big book. This is one of the secrets the book reveals. It has a section at the back which outlines the chapters chronologically, if so desired, but the book itself proceeds according to thematic segments. The way actual real life does. The book flows according to procedures for a well-timed ending. Just the way DFW’s own story flowed, as it turns out. The Obtuse Ovid does it again!
What he left us contained the message that at such a terminal point, opposites cease to be contradictions. We have been manufactured by fiction to serve reality. That’s what some of his poetry taught us. A kindred realm of silence, gesture and immobility. One is forced to keep perfectly still out of the quite logical compulsion to witness the slow erosion of the dream. The dream decays before our dreaming eyes, it evaporates, and suddenly there comes an end to all surmise. And after all, who in such a situation would want to hazard conjectures about the future? Thus spake Incandenza.
Hans Castorp moves to rise from his chair and decides against it, choosing instead to pour a fourteenth schnapps; Ulrich has been scanning the mountainous horizon as if looking for hot-air balloons; Harry Haller has become considerable smaller and seems to be on the verge of shrinking away altogether; Gwyon has made a fateful decision to return to the clergy, but in a more monastic form; Benny Profane has been the busiest of them all during DFW’s scintillating diatribe, rehearsing his own next sequence of yo-yo moves across the snow-capped mountains; and only Hal Incandenza seems slightly melancholy, knowing that he will soon be pressed into duty (expected Spring 2011) as a character with a different name, acting out his author’s insightful whims throughout all or most of The Pale King. And he knows that that one is unfinished, just like he was. Just like the author was. And he just sighs that sigh that all created characters must sigh: that sigh that is so clearly outlined in all of their contracts. Near the bottom, in the author’s blood.
Before I encountered the Lipsky road trip book on DFW, I knew him only as one of over 400 writers who have killed themselves over the years (don’t even ask about the list of literary critics who did so). Since then, I’ve read all the books this poor brilliant slob left to us (except for Everything And More, which after having read so much DFW I can now proudly say that I have a phobia about mathematics that’s he’s more than welcome to try to cure). Most of it is amazing. Some of it is horrifying. All of it is captivating in its
bravery and audacity.
Girl With Curious Hair, Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, and Oblivion are great collections of utterly sick stories, and A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again and Consider The Lobster are great collections of utterly sane essays. But it’s his big second novel, Infinite Jest, that reveals the surprising meaning: that life is thematic and not chronological or sequential. The Pale King? I don’t want to. But I will. Because he wrote it.
In the end, it’s not just that life ends, well-timed or not, that provides meaning to its obscure passage, but rather that it is temporary in the first place, that it is temporal and unfolds in time, on time. And also that none of us know, as per the sad but still inspiring case of DFW, just how long or short that temporariness actually might be. John Updike, one of the elder statesmen in the difficult and demanding field of DFW, and one who, like Roth and Mailer, was able to keep on writing book after book long after his initial early celebrity binge, has commented somewhere that things being brief, temporary, conditional, provisional or contingent shouldn’t necessarily disqualify them. It’s the same with great writers. Sometimes, there’s just something missing.
*
Infinite Regress. The ancients defined knowledge as justified true belief. Justification was providing some reasons, a rational explanation for the belief. True opinion accompanied by reason is knowledge. The infinite regress arises when we ask what are the justifications for the reasons themselves. If the reasons count as knowledge, they must be justified with reasons for the reasons, and reasons for those reasons. This leads the skeptic to suspension of judgment. They [skeptics] hand down also two other modes leading to suspension of judgment. Since every object of apprehension seems to be apprehended either through itself or through another object, by showing that nothing is apprehended either through itself or through another thing, they introduce doubt, as they suppose, about everything.
That nothing is apprehended through itself is plain, they say, from the controversy which exists amongst the physicists regarding, I imagine, all things, both sensibles and intelligibles; which controversy admits of no settlement because we can neither employ a sensible nor an intelligible criterion, since every criterion we may adopt is controverted and therefore discredited. And the reason why they do not allow that anything is apprehended through something else is this: If that through which an object is apprehended must always itself be apprehended through some other thing, one is involved in a process of circular reasoning or in regress ad infinitum.
The whole historical phenomenon of infinite regress is ideally suited to the barely hidden mathematical genius of DFW in every aspect of his novelistic and journalistic observations. That is his special gift: having this astonishing power of observation and this amazing power of description, rarely combined in one writer, living or dead. It would be a moment best summed up visually in the SA metaphor of the balcony of discourse, a conference of the clouds: every individual in the SA metaphor has something missing. That was what made and makes them all so special. We also have something missing. We identify. They are our surrogates living at the edges of emotional extremis. They cater our dreams and nightmares. They tell us the stories that we would have discovered for ourselves if only we had been brave enough or smart enough to do so.
That observation is also at the heart of the recent review of David Lipsky’s book on
DFW, “Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Who You Are: A Road Trip With David Foster Wallace”. Although I understand the perspective of Wyatt Mason in his New York Review of Books piece on DFW, perfectly titled, “Smarter Than You Think”,
I think he may have misinterpreted both the strategy employed by Lipsky to trick DFW (a very difficult and disturbed savant) into talking freely, as well as the strategy employed by DFW for daily survival on earth, one which now must perhaps be called into question.
Wyatt Mason put it very well when he was busy taking Lipsky and DFW to task: “The story “Good Old Neon” in Oblivion is not a Dostoyeskian ten-page monologue by someone trying to decide whether to commit suicide; rather, it is a forty-page monologue by someone who has committed suicide, and who would explain not so much how he could have come to such an end as what we mean when we say someone takes his life, and what such a taking leaves us—what the moments we’re left with might be able to contain. All Wallace’s formal ingenuity would have been for naught if he hadn’t been intent on using those forms to probe at the most injured parts of being.” 7)
This is of course as brilliant as it is poignant. Hemingway took his life. Virginia Woolf took her life. I believe their books took their lives. They took back their lives, but only after first giving them to us through their works. This is the most touching thing about Mason’s remark…. “what the moments we’re left with might be able to contain” and “what such a taking leaves us”. So, what are we left with? Something that amounts to an SA moment: what Hans Castorp in The Magic Mountain called a necessary science that yet to be invented, the sociology of suffering.
But of course, this current examination, somewhat of a prolegomenon, is about much more than DFW solely, it is in fact just as much about John Hawkes and William Gaddis and the American voice in general. A vernacular voice that also includes another primary DFW precedent, Herman Melville, most especially in his under-read The Confidence Man, from 1857, but most obviously in the titanic Moby Dick as an aesthetic a precursor. If IJ is anything, and it is many things, it is also a black shadow of that white whale. Needless to say, The Pale King is even more of an apt white whale image, the “big book” that Mailer eventually delivered with Ancient Evenings, perhaps, in 1983, a full 35 years after NATD. But it took DFW down the same way Ahab was enmeshed in the harpoon ropes and ended up sailing away with Moby, down to the bottom of the sea in the John Huston film version. Down to depths that even he probably couldn’t write about.
But one could also include Henry Roth or Harper Lee on that claustrophobic shortlist. And why was a tough old buzzard like William Styron able to overcome his inner demons and survive, even after writing a personal memoir about his depression called Darkness Visible and yet still go on to be 81 when he died of natural causes (such as not hanging, drowning or shooting yourself)? Whereas a young tough dude like DFW was not able to do so. Perhaps if he had addressed his depression directly in writing rather than in the coded ciphers that literally riddle his works he may have been able to overcome the black capsizing wave. Instead he embedded his feelings in a complex mythology of fiction versus fact versus nightmare, a battle ultimately won tidily by nightmare.
Similar ventures into the realm of dark laughter are of course legion, from Swift and Sterne onward but perhaps especially so in postwar American fiction. John Hawkes, one of the writers, along with Bill Gaddis, who most resonate through the crystalline vernacular voice of DFW, was engaged in a similar tag-team wrestling match with the history of literature and the history of doubt. And of course all of them toil in the huge modernist shadow cast by Joyce and others of his scope and scale. They are born ambitious, apparently.
Leslie A. Fiedler was one of the great advocates for both modernist literature and the
importance of literature in life generally, and in his prime he explored the precursors and their inheritors with an acute sense that the generation of writers that followed by modernists would be even more demanding and challenging. He was of course, both prescient and correct. In his masterful 1960 opus Love and Death in The American Novel, he managed to isolate and analyze several of the key subjects and issues inherent to the American literary voice, with particular emphasis on the curious obsession with depression and death that seems to haunt the American idiom.
One of the most accomplished yet least publicly known of visionary voices is John Hawkes, whose first novel in 1949, The Cannibal, cast a long shadow across a literary landscape which had naturally no inkling of the postmodern condition that would soon follow in a mere twenty years. This salvo was then followed in quick succession with: The Beetle Leg, The Lime Twig, The Blood Oranges, Second Skin, Travesty and The Passion Artist. Hawkes was therefore writing in a tongue that had yet to be created, precisely like other grand heretics such as Sterne and Kafka. Hawkes was therefore, like all heretics, living and working in advance of a broken myth.
Fiedler was doubly prescient when he wrote in the introduction to Hawkes’ The Lime Twig: “Everyone klnows that in our literature the age of experimentalism is over and an age of recapitulation has begun; and few of us, I suspect, really regret it. John Hawes neither rewrites nor recapitulates, and therefore, spares us neither terror nor truth. John Hawkes has managed both and is perhaps, after the publication of three books and on the verge of a fourth, is the least read novelist of substantial merit in the United States.” 8) He is also the direct precursor of a DFW, but ironically DFW would garner for the same kind of dark comedy a massive accidentally mainstream popular audience, something inconceivable for a Hawkes, or even a Pynchon.
He could also have been describing DFW in fact fifty years ago, when Fielder characterizes the contemporary literary dilemma this way: “Counterfeits of insanity (automatic writing, the scrawls of the drunk and doped) are finally boring; while the compositions of the actually insane are in the end merely documents, terrible and depressing. Hawkes gives us neither of these surrenders to unreason but rather reason’s last desperate attempt to know what unreason is; and in such knowledge there are possibilities not only for poetry and power but for pleasure as well.” 9)
This is anticipatory, visionary thinking in action, and in DFW, this notion is writ large in all his work, but especially in IJ, where that pesky meaning has been embedded, almost like a fossil, in the soil of his feverish imaginings. Or was it reportage? The fact is there is very little difference between the spirit and structure of his essays and the spirit and structure of his fiction, which makes his self-perceived unsurmountable problem all the more deplorable, all the more sad, all the more entertaining for all of us trying to fathom just what is contained in what he left us with when he took his life back and away.
And what is contained in what he left us? A cautionary tale warning against the dangers of literary solipsism, among other things, and for that matter, existential solipsism in everyday life, to which the author eventually surrendered. This position is most often confused with those Faustian themes that fuel most modernist styles as well as those that emerged afterward and needed to disguise themselves in something slightly more diverse and less monolithic.
In “The Power of Blackness: Faustian Man and the Cult of Violence,” from Love and Death in the American Novel, in 1966 (written when DFW was four years old) Fiedler discusses the idea of despair in Melville's works, asserting that Melville's style changed from gothic to romantic as his career progressed. He asserted that the reality of damnation he never denied; but the meaning of it, for one committed to a skeptical and secular view, he questioned. Especially in his later works, he presented the “mystery of iniquity” in such complexly ironical contexts that the wariest of readers is occasionally baffled.
Nevertheless, he kept faith throughout his fiction not only with the gothic vision in general, but with the Faustian theme. Likewise DFW would embrace damnation and the doom of a dark tragic comedy and he would similarly move from postmodern angst to a neo-baroque style while also exploring complexly ironical context which needless to say often baffles his readers. Or perhaps he only baffles people before they become his readers, since like most aspects of life, there are two kinds of people in the world: those who enjoy DFW and those who do not. Of course, there are also two other kinds of people in the world, those who think the world is divided into two kinds of people and those who do not.
Donald Brackett is a Toronto-based culture critic. He has published numerous articles essays and reviews, and two books on the dynamics of creative collaboration: one on Fleetwood Mac and one on the pathology singer-songwriters from Bob Dylan to Jack White. He is currently working on a book length study of the parallels between William Gaddis and David Foster Wallace, and the politics of writer’s block. He also teaches a cultural anthropology course with the Ontario College of Art and Design University in Toronto, and lectures on cultural history and theory at Innis College, U. of T.
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