David Foster Wallace

The post-modern, maddening maximalist (The Bus 6.16)

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ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED (1.48) 19 SEPTEMBER 2022

The Stop

David Foster Wallace (1962 - 2008) was an American novelist, short-story writer and essayist whose dense, complicated work offers a ‘dark, often satirical analysis’ of American culture. He wrote in a ‘self-consciously maximalist style,’ characterised by ‘endlessly fracturing’ narratives and complex sentences and footnotes.¹ The son of a philosophy professor father and English teacher mother, Wallace was an A student throughout high school, received a B.A. from Amherst College in 1985 and studied for a Master of Fine Arts at the University of Arizona. Despite a full scholarship to Harvard Graduate School to study philosophy, he decided - based on his experience with writing his senior thesis novel (The Broom of the System (1987)) - that only writing would suffice as a career: while philosophy made him feel he was using 50% of himself, writing made him feel like he was using 97%. In 1997, he received a MacArthur Foundation fellowship grant.²

David Foster Wallace/Alamy

Growing up in Champaign, Illinois, Wallace played American football - usually as quarterback - until he became a teenager. By all accounts he was very talented, but when in junior high he discovered there were ‘better quarterbacks … and people started hitting each other a lot harder,’ he realised it was no longer the sport for him. About this same time he discovered tennis - and was so good at the sport that by the age of 14, he could have played at the national level. However, this also was when he began to suffer from anxiety attacks and the clinical depression which eventually - after innumerable attempts to control his disease through hospitalisation, ECT, drugs and therapy - resulted in his suicide at the age of 46.³

Wallace’s most famous novel is Infinite Jest (1996), a ‘vast investigation into America as the land of addictions: to television, to drugs, to loneliness.’ Originally titled A Failed Entertainment and clocking in at just under 1100 pages, Infinite Jest is set in a near future where the normal calendar has been replaced by a sponsorship arrangement; most of the action occurs during the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment.⁴ At this point the USA, Canada and Mexico have been incorporated into ONAN - the Organisation of North American Nations - an arrangement violently opposed by a deadly group of legless French-Canadian ‘wheelchair assassins’ who are trying to obtain the titular film - said to be so entertaining, so ‘soothing and perfect it’s impossible to switch off … until you sink into your chair, spill your bladder, starve [and] die’ - for use as a terror weapon. Featuring a ‘sweeping cast of postmodern characters’ ranging from recovering alcoholics and foreign statesmen to residents of the halfway house and high-school tennis stars, Infinite Jest is the first of Wallace’s work to feature what became his ‘stylistic hallmark: the prominent use of notes (endnotes, in this case), which were Wallace’s attempt to reproduce the nonlinearity of human thought on the page.’⁵

In addition to fiction, Wallace was also a prodigious essayist. Using his ‘digressive, footnote-heavy prose to produce elaborate essays,’ he took on a variety of subjects including talk radio, John McCain’s presidential campaign, the Illinois State Fair, the question of lobster sentience at a lobster festival in Maine, David Lynch, travelling aboard a cruise liner in the Caribbean⁶ and the Adult Video News Awards in Las Vegas. In 2003 he published Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity in which he returned his attention to philosophy. At his death, his unfinished novel - published three years later as The Pale King (2011) - was the product of his investigation into boredom. Set in the IRS office in Peoria, Illinois, most of the novel’s characters are income tax return examiners who are beginning to understand boredom as a ‘potential means of attaining bliss’ - the very opposite to the culture of ‘overstimulation’ as described in Infinite Jest.⁷

The Detour

Today’s Detour is to a brief article from Princeton University Press about Sanskrit’s almost unimaginable versatility in providing words for even the most random emotion. As an example, the 11th century scholar King Bhoja parsed the nuances and varieties of attraction (anuraga) - a word ‘span[ning] the gamut from gentle affection to blinding erotic passion’ into no fewer than 64 varieties of human attraction which, once he ‘consider[ed] different circumstances, degrees of ephemerality, kinds of people, and other modalities … ultimately yield[ed] 12,228 possible nuances of attraction.’ In other words: if it exists, Sanskrit has a word for it.

Word Watch

The Recommendation

Today’s Recommendation is David Foster Wallace’s Consider the Lobster (2005). A collection of previously published essays, this is Wallace at his most incisive - and funny. Including a phenomenal review of Oxford’s A Dictionary of Modern American Usage (1999) and an account of the week he was embedded with John McCain’s 2000 presidential campaign, it also contains my favourite of his essays: ‘Big Red Son.’ The product of an assignment by Premiere Magazine to cover the Adult Video News Awards - the porn industry’s version of the Oscars - it is hilarious, eye-opening and - as one might imagine, given the material -  gloriously rude. Highly recommended. Oh, and you must read the footnotes.

From the back: ‘Do lobsters feel pain? Did Franz Kafka have a sick sense of humour? What is John Updike’s deal anyway? And who won the Adult Video News Female Performer of the Year Award the same year Gwyneth Paltrow won her Oscar? David Foster Wallace answers these questions and more in this hilarious new collection of essays. He immerses himself in the three-ring circus that is the presidential race in order to document one of the most vicious campaigns in recent history. Later he strolls from booth to booth at a lobster festival in Maine and risks life and limb to get to the bottom of the lobster question. In Consider the Lobster, one of the sharpest minds of our time delves into some of life’s most delicious and distinctly modern topics.

For a review from The Guardian: A Cult Above the Rest

The Sounds

Today’s playlist is composed of tracks that (loosely) remind me of Wallace’s voice, style, attitude and - from the little I’ve read - his life. Whether anyone agrees with me is entirely subjective, of course - but the Love/Hate track puts it into perspective: ‘Between the Bars’ (Elliott Smith, 1997), ‘Here’s Where the Story Ends’ (The Sundays, 1990), ‘Don’t Fuck With Me’ (Love/Hate, 1992), ‘Straight to Hell’ (Drivin N Cryin, 1989) and ‘Holocene’ (Bon Iver, 2013). Enjoy.

The Thought

Today’s Thought is from the Danish physicist Niels Bohr (1885-1962). Generally regarded as one of the ‘foremost physicists’ of the 20th century, Bohr received the 1922 Nobel Prize for Physics for his application of quantum concepts to the problem of atomics and molecular structure.⁸ Supposedly, he once admonished Einstein during an argument:

‘No, no, you’re not thinking; you’re just being logical.’

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1. I first encountered Wallace when I bought Infinite Jest from my favourite bookstore of all time - the original Highland Books in Brevard, North Carolina. For weeks I carried it in my briefcase, taking any opportunity to work my way through the story. Once, during office hours at Brevard College where I was teaching a New Testament survey course (my students weren’t exactly the visit-the-teacher-during-office-hours types), it was out on my desk when the then-Head of Humanities stopped by and asked about the book. I started enthusing about stream of consciousness, maximalism and post-modernism, etc. when he just shook his head, said the whole thing sounded pretentious and left. I was so unimpressed by his reaction - he was an English professor, for God’s sake - I remember his dismissal nearly 30 years later. Sources for today’s Stop include: Max, D. T. Every Love Story is A Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace (London: Granta, 2012), The Lost Years and Last Days of David Foster Wallace (Rolling Stone), David Foster Wallace (Britannica), Infinite Jest - 20 Things You Need to Know (Guardian), The Unfinished (The New Yorker).

2. Also known as a ‘genius grant,’ MacArthur Fellowships are no-strings-attached fellowships awarded to support ‘creative people, effective institutions, and influential networks building a more just, verdant, and peaceful world.’ See: MacArthur Foundation.

3. Though he never wrote directly about his own experience, depression often features in his work. In the short story ‘The Depressed Person’ (from Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (1999)), he wrote: ‘Paxil, Zoloft, Prozac, Tofranil, Wellbutrin, Elavil, Metrazol in combination with unilateral ECT (during a two-week voluntary in-patient course of treatment at a regional Mood Disorders clinic), Parnate both with and without lithium salts, Nardil both with and without Xanax. None had delivered any significant relief from the pain and feelings of emotional isolation that rendered the depressed person’s every waking hour an indescribable hell on earth.’

4. Other sponsored years include the Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad, Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar, the Year of the Whisper-Quiet Maytag Dishmaster …. not dissimilar to what’s happened to every sporting/entertainment venue in the Western world.

5. Obviously, not everyone liked - or likes - Wallace. The critic Dale Peck referred to Infinite Jest as ‘bloated, boring, gratuitous and - perhaps especially - uncontrolled,’ while Harold Bloom called it ‘just awful’ and said that ‘Stephen King is Cervantes compared with Wallace.’ Which - even though I disagree - I have to admit is a pretty good line. Of course, in Infinite Jest Wallace refers to Bloom’s work as ‘stupefyingly turgid-sounding shit’ - which couldn’t have gone down well with the big guy.

6. This essay - ‘A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again’ (and the title of his first collection of nonfiction) exposed Wallace to a completely different type of reader. Unlike his fiction, his essays were ‘endlessly charming … [like] the best friend you’d ever have, spotting everything, whispering jokes, sweeping you past what was irritating or boring or awful in humane style.’

7. Wallace is fascinating and the D. T. Max biography (see footnote one) is an information-packed, well-paced biography. If you’re interested in his fiction, but don’t want to dive straight into Infinite Jest, the stories of Oblivion are a good place from which to jump. But, to be fair, to get the best picture of Wallace and his style, voice and interests - I’d start with today’s book recommendation.

8. For more on Bohr, see: Niels Bohr (Britannica)