A Supposedly Fun Guy Who Will Never Live Again
Who hasn’t read David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest yet? It seems like required these days if you want to seem conversant in high-brow pop culture, right along with “Arrested Development”. DFW’s suicide at the age of 46 (in 2008) served to further cement its cult status. The slew of obituaries that followed his death were certainly respectful – some even reverent – but they were almost without exception utterly factual. There was a obsession among eulogizers with the death itself. Its causes, its circumstances, its meaning.
I’ve been reading his collection of essays A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, and its struck me that DFW’s death, more than anything, was just sad. And it’s not because he was an exceptional writer or a former junior semi-pro tennis player. It’s because he gave voice to an incredible mind. He saw the world both sardonically and affectionately. He never talks down to you, but you still feel the presence of genius in his writing. He quite deliberately describes the puzzle his own style tries to solve in “E Unibus Pluram” (PDF):
The rebellious irony in the best postmodern fiction wasn’t only credible as art; it seemed downright socially useful in its capacity for what counterculture critics call “a critical negation that would make it self-evident to everyone that the world is not as it seems.” Kesey’s dark parody of asylums suggested that our arbiters of sanity were maybe crazier than their patients; Pynchon reoriented our view of paranoia from deviant psychic fringe to central thread tin the corporo-bureaucratic wave; DeLillio exposed image, signal, data, and tech as agents of spiritual chaos and not social order. …
So then how have irony, irreverence, and rebellion come to be not liverating but enfeebling in the culture today’s avant-garde tries to write about? One clue’s to be found in the fact that irony is still around, bigger than ever after thirty long years as the dominant mode of hip expression. It’s not a mode that wears especially well. As Hype puts it, “Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time, it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy their cage.” …
And make no mistake: irony tyrannizes us. The reason why our pervasive cultural irony is at once so powerful and so unsatisfying is that an ironist is impossible to pin down. All irony is a variation on a sort of existential poker-face. All U.S. irony is based on an implicit “I don’t really mean whatI say.” So what does irony as a cultural norm mean to say? That it’s impossible to mean what you say? … Most likely, I think, today’s irony ends up saying: “How very banal to ask what I mean.” Anyone with the heretical gall to ask an ironist what he actually stands for ends up looking like a hysteric or a prig. And herein lies the oppressiveness of institutionalized irony, the too-successful rebel: the ability to interdict the question without attending to its content is tyranny. …
And this is why the fiction-writing citizen of our televisual culture is in such deep doo. What do you do when postmodern rebellion becomes a pop-cultural institution? For this of course is the second clue to why avant-garde irony and rebellion have become dilute and malign. They have been absorbed, emptied, and redeployed by the very televisual establishment they had originally set themselves athwart. …
What response to television’s commercialization of the modes of literary protest seem possible, then, today? One obvious option is for the fiction writer to become reactionary, fundamentalist. Declare contemporary television evil and contemporary culture evil and turn one’s back on the whole Spandexed mess and genuflect instead to good old pre-sixties Hugh Beaumontish virtues and literal readings of the Testaments and be pro-Life, anti-Flouride, antidiluvian. The problem with this is that Americans who’ve opted for this tack seem to have one eyebrow straight across their forehead and knuckles that drag on the ground and just seem like an excellent crowd to want to transcend.
Although he never reaches an answer to the question that fuels the essay, he seems to have achieved something similar in his writing, somehow. And when I refer to DFW’s writing I’m talking about his novels, sure, but also – and especially – his hilariously maudlin first-person essays. More than any other writer, he manages to bring the reader inside himself without writing about himself. He makes himself the blank slate, the universally relatable protagonist (thx Paul) and invites the reader to see hugely normal phenomena through his massively abnormal eyes.
In an absolute stroke of genius, some editor at Harper’s sent DFW to document various typical American experiences. The Illinois state fair, a luxury cruise. In these works, more than anywhere else, you begin to feel like you know this man. Like you could have a conversation with him about nearly anything. Like he’d laugh at your jokes, or make jokes you could laugh at. He’s deadly smart but approachable, a very special kind of friend. A friend you’ve never met.
At the 2005 Kenyon College commencement address, he said that the purpose of education was to teach “how to keep you from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable, adult lives dead, unconscious, a slave to your … natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperiously alone”. In this respect, DFW was a kind of educator for us all, waking us up to the beautiful, lovable irony of the world all around us.
