-You more have to come at the aesthetic stuff obliquely, to talk around it, or — as Aquinas did with his own ineffable subject — to try to define it in terms of what it is not...genius is not replicable. Inspiration, though, is contagious, and multiform — and even just to see, close up, power and aggression made vulnerable to beauty is to feel inspired and (in a fleeting, mortal way) reconciled.
-David Foster Wallace
It took me several tries to actually get through the first ten pages or so. The book looked awesome. Its size (that of a large dictionary or a smallish encyclopedia) alone could do that. One of the reasons I bought it was as to make a sort of dare, if you will, to myself, as I had read "Brief Interviews With Hideous Men" and was still not completely convinced of Wallace's prowess. I suppose I felt I didn't really get it, the hullaballoo, but was sure this was not going to stop me from finding the chinks in the invincible man's armor. The plot to Infinite Jest, when all is said and done, sounded not only interesting, but fun (entertaining art! what a concept!), and it had the critical praise from high ranked pundits plastered on it like decals.
The opening scene to the book, however, proves more difficult to read as time goes on, since the prose is abstract and weird (a dictionary/thesaurus is a must when reading this book, unless you are in MENSA). Therefore, I hunted less experimental prose until I was
really ready. That day came until about a year later. It took me several months to read it cover to cover. Someone (a critic, of course) claimed to have read it in a day, which must surely mean he must have invested some serious money on a phenomenal speed reading course (I am pretty sure he was lying, though). Or he read it the way one reads the newspaper, skipping about 80% of it. To which I can only say: I have
also done that to impress peers, especially if they are sexually attractive
.
Roger Federer, Michael Jordan, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Pablo Picasso, Miles Davis, Jimmy Hendrix, and Muhammad Ali, and yes, David Foster Wallace are similar in that at one point in their careers, there simply wasn't any competition for them. They were supremely far and away. Sure, Federer now has Nadal, as Ali had Frazier, Picasso his Matisse, Wittgenstein (ok, Wittgeinstein never had competition), but there was one point were they dethroned everything, and no one knew where the chink was.
DFWallace certainly enjoyed this status for a time. Anything you did as a writer, essayist, novelist, or journalist, Wallace simply did better (and usually funnier). While that is certainly not true now, it was true at one point. It must have sucked ass to have been his contemporary, I imagine.
For example, the publicity juggernaut that was Damien Hirst demoralized many an art student at the time (90's to 'noughties). "How could I do
that?". Jonathan Franzen reminisces how DFWallace's brilliance overshadowed whatever he was doing at the time. Which is surely some sort of sportsmanship thing but is probably more than partly true.
The problem with David, of course, was his illness. Probably not the whole fame, too fast too much, or dramatic fall from grace. He kept writing until his (never a word so eerily well suited)
untimely death in 2008 by suicide. He kept writing well, it seemed. The successor to Infinite Jest had not arrived, several story books, essay collections, and projects seemed to keep him in the 'active writer' section.
His depression, however, had other plans. Reading several articles about him later on, it is surprising how little we knew about his illness. He had been on suicide watch as early as undergraduate studies. He had been on anti depressants for more than half his life. A surprise to find such a funny, witty, confident writer is in fact such a fragile psyche.
But so he was.
A talented tennis player, David showed promise early in his teenage years, going on to win several regional tournaments. Tennis would prove to be one of his fascinations inside and outside the text ("Federer as Religious Experience" probably his most revelatory). Yet he never made it to "the show", that is, he never got past the stage where you go from promising athlete to career athlete. The whys are somewhat nebulous. But the point is that for David, this seemed to be a demon to haunt him throughout his life: the idea that his potential by far outweighed his actuality.
Which is something of a thing about taste (or perception), in the end. Sometimes, it seems we prefer, as writer Roberto Bolaño (another untimely death) says, "complete works", tiny masterpieces that are self-enclosed, like Herman Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener" to "Moby Dick", Cormac McCarthy's "The Road" to "Blood Meridian". The imperfect, unfinished masterpiece seems self indulgent, vain, and puerile. Which earned DFWallace a nasty (false) reputation for being vain, arrogant, and puerile (a writer once pointed out how he had acne cream among his toiletries, as if this indicated his huge, vain, ego--apparently, a real writer would let acne suppurate into boils, and sleep in his ragged coat like Franz Kafka or live off prison soup like Jean Genét). Whether this did in fact affect him is largely unknown, but it could be annoyingly flattering at its worse. Yet the transition from great promise to fascinating careers is one of the maladies of our time. We are not content with just being good or great at something. We need to make a fucking star career out of it. The pleasure principle is largely controlled by how much media and attention you generate. Which of course, sucks. Especially if you are into fine arts, literature, or an obscure sport like, say, badminton. Which is again, a thing about preference. Why soccer is more popular than ping pong would yield an objective, yet false, answer. The fact is we don't know. We just like soccer more, and that's pretty much its own reason. Of course you could give a sociological, psychological, and geopolitical argument as to the whys, but that would be, aside from a grand waste of time (in which some people indulge in), untrue.
And but so...
While the demise of DFWallace is a great, tragedy, it is also human. His death is more painful because it happened while he was still so young. But he was desperately ill, and suffering from the greatest maladies that haunt the artistic temperament: depression and mental illness. Peter Schejeldahl, the art critic, correctly pointed out that having an artistic temperament is only a boon for fools and dilettantes. The whole artist-as-crazy-genius is not applicable here, though. There was no agony, no ecstasy, no filth and fury for DFWallace as opposed to say, VincentVG. Just a sickness. The "sickness unto death," as Soren Kierkegaard would say.
Yet DFWallace's presence is still felt. From Dave Eggers to Jonathan Franzen to Zadie Smith to Men's Health columnists, Wallace's style, and his canniness about human behavior can be read far and wide. Many times unconsciously, as if it is just something that writers do. Consider the stream of consciousness. How many writers are thinking about the concept while doing it? Or abstraction? or syncopation? Nowadays so many writers, perhaps unknowingly, sound just like David. Now that is surely genius.
xF
