David Foster Wallace on Planet Trillaphon

D. T. Max
EVERY LOVE STORY IS A GHOST STORY
A Life of David Foster Wallace
352pp. Granta Books. £20.
978 1 84708 494 1
US: Viking. $27.95.
978 0 670 02592

3 Stephen J. Burn, editor
CONVERSATIONS WITH DAVID FOSTER WALLACE
186pp. University Press of Mississippi. $65.
978 1 61703 227 1

David Foster Wallace
BOTH FLESH AND NOT
327pp. Hamish Hamilton. £20.
978 0 241 14482 4
US: Little, Brown. $26.99.
978 0 316 18237 9

Published: 13 March 2013

David Foster Wallace, 1996 © Garry Hannabarger/Corbis

D avid Foster Wallace walked into great literature, as Trotsky said of Céline, the way other people walk into their homes. From the publication of his undergraduate fiction thesis, The Broom of the System (1987)*, to the unfinished manuscript he left after his suicide in 2008, The Pale King, Wallace’s life was an object of interest for even the most inert cultural bystanders. His cockiness, insecurity, ambition, anthropological precision and meticulous avoidance of the ordinary sentence – all of this won Wallace the double-edged honour of being regularly proclaimed “the voice of his generation”. For Americans who came of age in the 1990s and worried whether their times would produce a writer of the same cultural heft as the giants of the post-war decades, Wallace’s battleship of a book, Infinite Jest (1996), and his flotilla of stories and essays arrived just in time. Now, in lock step with the worthies he once called “The Great Male Narcissists” – John Updike, Norman Mailer, Philip Roth – Wallace has a biography, a hallowed archive, and a swooning field of “Wallace studies”.

Even if Wallace had been a minor writer, his career would demand attention on purely taxonomical grounds. He grew up in the Midwest, went to college in New England, did an MFA in the Southwest, and ended his life in California. He was one of the first American novelists to study English in the heyday of literary theory, whose teachings he dutifully digested and often parodied. He was more fluent in Continental philosophy than any other major American novelist since Walker Percy. He railed against several schools of American fiction – which, in an early essay now collected in Both Flesh and Not, he variously diagnosed as “Neiman-Marcus Nihilism” (Jay McInerney and Bret Easton Ellis), “Catatonic Realism” (“‘a.k.a. Ultraminimalism, a.k.a. Bad Carver”) and “Workshop Hermeticism” (“fiction for which the highest praise involves the words ‘competent,’ ‘finished,’ ‘problem-free’”). Wallace had a habit of writing savage pronouncements about what was wrong with his culture, and how his own fiction was specially designed to handle “real American type sadness”.

D. T. Max’s biography is written in the tidy, crisp style of the New Yorker, where Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story originated as an article in 2009. For the most part, Max avoids the standard pitfalls of literary biography, including the one Wallace himself singled out in a 2004 review of Edwin Williamson’s Life of Borges about prospecting “for personal stuff encoded in the writer’s art”. Max skirts away from searching for definitive transmissions of influence and focuses instead on old-fashioned questions of character. He is intent on giving us a sense of Wallace’s complicated temperament, one which veered between archly formal intellectual one-upmanship and a down-home quality which won him a devoted following among those willing to overlook how artfully that unpretentiousness was put together. The advantage of Max’s graceful and well-researched account is that, for the most part, it invites us to do much of the thinking about how Wallace understood the connection between his life and writing on our own. The only exceptions come in the places where Max tries to convince us that likeability was the central concern for Wallace as a writer, which at times he threatens to jam like a psychological skeleton key into the books.

Wallace came into his own as a writer at Amherst College in Massachusetts in the 1980s, where he arrived as an interloper from Illinois among well-heeled preppy peers. “Midwestern boys might teach or read or make ironic fun of novels”, writes Max in one of his bizarre asides about the heartland, “but they did not go to college to learn how to write them.” Fiction on campus, Wallace would claim, was the province of “foppish aesthetes”, who “went around in berets stroking their chins”. Max’s portrait of these years is of a student getting the top marks, lest anyone mistake him for not being the cleverest boy in the room. (When, years later, the film Good Will Hunting came out, Wallace not only seemed to identify with Matt Damon’s character, but actually tried to follow the blurry equations on the chalkboard.) Max describes a regime that reserved forty-five minutes for dental hygiene, afternoon bong hits, six-hour bouts with the books, and evening whisky shots on the library steps. We get good glimpses of Wallace’s table-talk: “Does anyone want to see Friedrich Hayek get hit on by a girl from Wilton, Connecticut?”. Wallace’s fanbase in future years would consist of fellow liberal arts graduates who saw his work as an opportunity to exercise their education while savouring the pop-cultural references in his prose. But it was Wallace’s style itself, at once laid back and hilariously precise, that seduced a generation. Take this classic passage where Wallace pre-emptively mourns the etiquette of the old-school telephone call:

“A traditional aural-only conversation – utilizing a hand-held phone whose earpiece contained only 6 little pinholes but whose mouthpiece (rather significantly, it later seemed) contained (62) or 36 little pinholes – let you enter into a kind of highway-hypnotic semi-attentive fugue: while conversing, you could look around the room, doodle, fine-groom, peel tiny bits of dead skin away from your cuticles, compose phone-pad haiku, stir things on the stove; you could even carry on a whole separate additional sign-language-and-exaggerated-facial-expression type of conversation with people right there in the room with you, all while seeming to be right there attending closely to the voice on the phone. And yet – this was the retrospectively marvelous part – even if you were dividing your attention between the phone call and all sorts of other little fugue-like activities, you were somehow never haunted by the suspicion that the person on the other end’s attention might be similarly divided. During a traditional call, e.g., as you let’s say performed a close tactile blemish-scan of your chin, you were in no way oppressed by the thought that your phonemate was perhaps also devoting a good percentage of her attention to a close tactile blemish-scan.”

This is a snippet of a much larger passage, but it’s cherishable, not only for the way it mimics the fleetingness of our attention spans, but also for the truth it delivers about our socially repugnant self-centredness. The huge interference and distracting pleasures that we conspire to build between us would become one of Wallace’s great subjects.

It’s no exaggeration to say depression was one of Wallace’s reasons for writing fiction in the first place

Wallace’s struggle with depression is one of the main points of orientation for Max’s biography, and it’s the most valuable contribution of the book. Twice during college, Wallace was forced to leave school and return home to Champaign, Illinois, where he tried to ride out his illness on a drug called Tofranil. It’s no exaggeration to say depression was one of Wallace’s reasons for writing fiction in the first place. In “The Planet Trillaphon as it Stands in Relation to the Bad Thing”, his first published story in the Amherst Review, Wallace enters the mind of a Brown undergraduate who goes on anti-depressants after trying to kill himself. The power of the story lies in Wallace’s ability to convey what the “Bad Thing” feels like from the inside. The story begins, as Max notes, with a seemingly loose Salingeresque introduction:

“I’ve been on antidepressants for, what, about a year now, and I suppose I feel as if I’m pretty qualified to tell what they’re like. They’re fine, really, but they’re fine in the same way that, say, living on another planet that was warm and comfortable and had food and fresh water would be fine: it would be fine, but it wouldn’t be good old Earth, obviously. I haven’t been on Earth now for almost a year, because I wasn’t doing very well on Earth. I’ve been doing somewhat better here where I am now, on the planet Trillaphon, which I suppose is good news for everyone involved.”

The repetitions and played-up quaintness here give the sense of a consciousness that has been lulled into congeniality. But as the story unfolds, and the imprecisions come into focus, the narrator comes to see that depression is not “just sort of really intense sadness, like what you feel when your very good dog dies, or when Bambi’s mother gets killed in Bambi”. Rather, it’s a kind of auto-immune deficiency of the self:

“All this business about people committing suicide when they’re ‘severely depressed;’ we say, ‘Holy cow, we must do something to stop them from killing themselves!’ That’s wrong. Because all these people have, you see, by this time already killed themselves, where it really counts. By the time these people swallow entire medicine cabinets or take naps in the garage or whatever, they’ve already been killing themselves for ever so long. When they ‘commit suicide,’ they’re just being orderly.”

Wallace’s most exhaustive attempt to pin down the mental procedures of depression would come fifteen years later in “The Depressed Person”, collected in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. The story recounts the struggle of “the Depressed Person” who is encouraged by her therapist to take part in exercises like Inner-Child Therapy Retreat Weekend and self-prescribed Quiet Times and to rely on a Support Network of friends to help cope with her illness (the ominous capitalizations are Wallace’s). The Depressed Person, like many depressed people, is both an extreme egotist and acutely empathetic. She deeply empathizes with how boring and annoying and frustrating it is for others to talk with her, and this makes her feel deeply ashamed, which only sharpens her depression. By the end of the story, the whole idea of a Support System, and a host of other balms for depression, are demolished by Wallace. The story reminds us that in his scrupulous mapping of the Depressed Person’s mind, Wallace, for all the spectacular voltage of his prose, was possibly the most gifted realist of his generation, even if he was at odds with that gift. Regardless of how much technical jargon and therapy talk and business-speak he injected into his writing, often making it purposefully painful to read, he was not content to make it on pure mimeticism alone. “Look man, we’d probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is?”, Wallace tells Larry McCaffery in Conversations with David Foster Wallace. “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.”

What newspapers were to Kierkegaard, television was to Wallace

“The Depressed Person” goes to the heart of Wallace’s work, and not simply because we know that Wallace, too, had a Support System towards the end of his life, which included his devoted parents, his wife, his agent, and friends such as Jonathan Franzen who could dodge Wallace’s defences. Alongside Wallace’s struggle with depression was a more ubiquitous form of cultural malaise that he pitted himself against. Just as there were antidepressants that helped him to function as a writer, but which he never made peace with, so there were cultural phenomena which Wallace saw as distracting Americans from their freedom to make definite meaning out of their lives. What newspapers were to Kierkegaard, television was to Wallace. He saw it as an escape into an irony-saturated space where opinions flow and mutate easily, but where passionate commitments appear ridiculous. The point was not that television was responsible for turning America into a nation of addicts. “It was, far more dangerously”, as Max puts it, “an attitude toward life that TV had learned from fiction, especially from postmodern fiction, and then had reinforced among its viewers, and that attitude was irony.” Wallace knew the cultural necessity of irony and even cynicism – they were much needed for the work of exposing the hypocrisies and duplicities of the 1950s and 1960s. “The problem”, Wallace told McCaffery,

“is that once the rules for art are debunked, and once the unpleasant realities the irony diagnoses are revealed and diagnosed, then what do we do? Irony’s useful for debunking illusions, but most of the illusion-debunking in the U.S. has now been done and redone. Once everybody knows that equality of opportunity is bunk and Mike Brady’s bunk and Just Say No is bunk, now what do we do?”

Wallace himself found refuge in an irony-free zone after a short stint as a graduate student in the philosophy department at Harvard, where he studied with, among others, John Rawls and Stanley Cavell. In 1989, suffering from severe drug addiction, he checked into the alcohol and drug rehabilitation centre Granada House in Allston, Massachusetts, which became the model for Ennet House in Infinite Jest. The novel takes place in the first decade of the twenty-first century, in the “Organization of North American Nations” (O.N.A.N.), where people speak “US English” and submit to “in-person exchanges”. America has become a moral wasteland poised for mass paralysis through entertainment. The action revolves around a fascistic Tennis Academy, a cell of Québécois terrorists, and Ennet House, where Wallace’s recovering hero, Don Gately, discovers that the most enlivening truths are contained in the deadliest clichés:

“The desperate, newly sober White Flaggers are always encouraged to invoke and pay empty lip-service to slogans they don’t yet understand or believe – e.g. “Easy Does it!” and “Turn It Over!” and “One Day At a Time!” It’s called “Fake It Till You Make It,” itself an oft-invoked slogan. Everyone on a Commitment who gets up publicly to speak starts out saying he’s an alcoholic, says it whether he believes he is yet or not; then everybody up there says how Grateful he is to be sober today and how great it is to be Active and out on a Commitment with his Group, even if he’s not grateful or pleased about it at all. You’re encouraged to keep saying stuff like this until you start to believe it, just like if you ask somebody with serious sober time how long you’ll have to keep schlepping to all these goddamn meetings he’ll smile that infuriating smile and tell you just until you start to want to go to all these goddamn meetings.”

Wallace understood well that the type of sincerity he called for could not exist in a vacuum, and the community of hardened addicts he set out to describe in Infinite Jest suggested that there were some Support Systems he was prepared to believe in. But the novel succeeded less in depicting a community of desperate souls than in creating a community of readers. By the end of the book, Wallace had barely breached the problem of boredom, which would perhaps become the central problem for him, and which he confronted most directly in The Pale King.

Max reports the now-famous episode of Wallace, while teaching at Illinois State University in the early 2000s, signing up to take advanced tax classes at the university and corresponding at length with an IRS veteran about the US tax code. According to Max, Wallace was fascinated by a change in the tax code undertaken by the Reagan administration which changed the mission of the IRS from tax compliance to revenue maximalization. “A fiscal mission had replaced a civic one”, Max writes. By taking on the country’s most despised and mind-numbing institution as a proxy for the boredom of society at large, and forcing us to pay attention to the minutiae of its provisions, Wallace seemed to be living up to Auden’s injunction for novelists to become “the whole of boredom”.

The Pale King is at times an excruciating read, not least because for long stretches Wallace subjects the reader to the very boredom about which he’s writing:

“Lane Dean, Jr. . . . did two more returns, then another one, then flexed his buttocks and held to a count of ten and imagined a warm pretty beach with mellow surf, as instructed in orientation the previous month. Then he did two more returns, checked the clock real quick, then two more, then bore down and did three in a row, then flexed and visualized and bore way down and did four without looking up once . . . . After just an hour the beach was a winter beach, cold and gray and the dead kelp like the hair of the drowned, and it stayed that way despite all attempts.”

Towards the end of The Pale King (or at least at the end of what Wallace’s editor, Michael Pietsch, has collated from the author’s notes), there is a long scene where Shane Drinion, an IRS examiner, has a conversation at a bar in Peoria with Meredith Rand, another IRS examiner. Drinion gives Rand his total attention in a way that makes her both curious and suspicious about this robotic interlocutor who seems to answer every question with complete transparency. Suddenly, Drinion starts to levitate a few millimeters above his bar stool – though only we readers see this. Drinion turns out to be Wallace’s holy fool, and in the notes Wallace left behind for the novel, he says this about the character:

“Drinion is happy. Ability to pay attention. It turns out that bliss – a second-by-second joy + gratitude at the gift of being alive, conscious – lies on the other side of crushing boredom. Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you can find (tax returns, televised golf), and, in waves, a boredom like you’ve never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it’s like stepping from black and white into color. Like water after days in the desert. Constant bliss in every atom.”

It’s a beautiful piece of writing, but the fact that Wallace has pinned his version of happiness on a human drone is more than a little unsatisfactory. According to Max, The Pale King seeks to “show people a way to insulate themselves from the toxic freneticism of American life” and “to dramatize boredom without being too entertaining”. And yet, avers Max, the book could only achieve this by ignoring “the point that the kind of personality that conferred grace was the opposite of Wallace’s own”. But the “grace” in The Pale King is ultimately as illusory as the solidarity envisioned in Infinite Jest. The only thing that seems clear from this novel is that boredom is more than a harmless discomfort. The fight against it expresses a need to secure the vitality of the self at all costs.

That Wallace was a moralist in his fiction goes without saying, but since his death he has often been reduced to the most banal sort – a cheap monger of “mindfulness”. The blame partly lies with Wallace’s speech “This is Water”, which he delivered as the Kenyon College Commencement address in 2005. In the speech, Wallace counsels his undergraduate audience that they can choose how to make meaning out of their lives. In the tides of boredom that wash over us in our daily lives, Wallace declares that anyone who harnesses the power of his own attention is king:

“You can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line. Maybe she’s not usually like this. Maybe she’s been up three straight nights holding the hand of a husband who is dying of bone cancer. Or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the motor vehicle department, who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a horrific, infuriating, red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness.”

The point for Wallace – it was Nietzsche’s point long before him – is that we construct ourselves by assembling our experiences, desires and actions in the way a novelist gives coherence to the incidental plot points of a novel. We can, as Wallace says, “choose what we worship”. This seems like a fair enough point to make to a group of graduating college students, but when applied without qualification to Wallace’s novels and stories, it can narrow the scope of his fiction rather than widen it.

Consider an otherwise acute reader of Wallace such as Zadie Smith. In her homage to Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, she reads several of the stories with an eye for cathartic moments. In Wallace’s story “Signifying Nothing”, a teenage boy can’t understand why his father once waggled his penis in front of him as a child in the family basement. The boy is infuriated when his father refuses to hear him out about the memory. The boy leaves his family for a year. Gradually, he lets go of the need to confront his father and decides that the old man simply deleted the incident from his mind a long time ago. For Smith, the boy’s ability to enter into his father’s perspective is meant to provoke an epiphany in the reader. “Generally, we refuse to be each other”, Smith writes, “Our own experiences feel necessarily more real than other people’s, skewed by our sense of our own absolute centrality. But this young man in his simplicity does the difficult thing: he makes a leap into otherness.”

But does he? A stronger possibility for the story seems to be that the boy has invented the waggling incident wholesale and that his father is right to ignore him. At least this is an option that Wallace holds out for us to entertain. Instead of seeing the end of the story as a miraculous moment of closure, as Smith does, we might also wonder if Wallace is describing a family that has sinisterly pulled the son back into its web. In her commitment to seeing an ethicist at work, Smith sometimes overlooks the darker lining of Wallace’s fiction, which threatens to dissolve every moment of transcendence. Wallace’s hideous men are, after all, talented narcissists, who know how to use the language of personal discovery and moral progress in the service of gratifying their desires.

In an intriguing essay on Wallace’s public reception in The Legacy of David Foster Wallace (reviewed in the TLS, July 13, 2012) Ed Finn includes a computer analysis of Wallace’s Amazon statistics and consumer reviews. Finn reports that, unlike most contemporary sensations, Wallace’s books tend to lead readers to buy canonical works – Joyce, Melville, Hugo, Shakespeare, etc – giving us a glimpse into the inner workings of popular canonization. Wallace of course opens himself up for these comparisons. What is a more perfect bookend for his mourning of the old-style telephone in Infinite Jest than Proust’s misgivings about his first telephone call in À la Recherche du temps perdu? In another essay in the same volume, Kathleen Fitzpatrick reads through the huge troves of online reactions to Wallace in an attempt to discover the “affective relationship” between Wallace’s books and their readers. Testimonies by readers show Wallace’s books are being read in just the sort of self-medicating, therapeutic way that seems to simplify his work, but which is so heartfelt that it is hard to begrudge. Whether Infinite Jest will one day become a remote masterpiece that ambitious young writers read in order to impress the old guard will be something to watch. But to be the master distiller of the times for a generation is no small feat. It requires a willingness to dirty your hands in the culture to a point at which most novelists would flinch. It means being willing to swallow boredom whole.

Thomas Meaney is a co-editor of the Utopian and a doctoral candidate in History at Columbia University. He is writing a dissertation on US policy intellectuals and self-determination movements in the 1960s.

This has been corrected; we originally gave the title of the book as The Broom in the System.