David Foster Wallace’s final attempt to make art moral
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CrOL-ydFMI
[2] https://jamesclear.com/great-speeches/this-is-water-by-david...
This commencement speech that Wallace gave is deeply moving and thought-provoking to me every time I listen to it -- and I have probably heard it at least 10 times.
I have shared it with others, most of whom have had a very similar reaction to it.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Foster_Wallace#Death
Not ashamed to say I've cried more than once listening to it. It's a lifesaver.
The general theme is that regardless of the monotonous reality, there’s still plenty of beauty and intrigue to find within it if you look closely enough.
To make this point, The Pale King is about an IRS agent and it includes long, meditative descriptions of turning the pages of extremely long tax forms. I don’t know what philosophical ideas DFW ran into explicitly, i.e. whether he was reframing or actually deriving them, but he was absolutely rubbing up against what we now call mindfulness.
Edit to add one of my favorite scenes in literature ever, with no spoiler or even narrative substance: There's a scene where two characters are talking to one another and one party becomes so engrossed by the conversation that he begins to literally levitate out of his chair. I find this such a simple description of a truly profound experience (~~flow state).
One approach can be to hate it and cut it super short and not take care of it and it slowly turns into a weed patch and something you resent even more. But you still have to get out there and cut it.
Another approach is to learn about cultivation and care and take pride in it and think of the benefits like exercise and having a lawn you take pride in. You also open up the option to learn a lot of things.
So now something that has to be done isn't something you dread because you were determined to find something good in it.
If you can't find any way to take this approach with something then you have to make it not exist (don't have a lawn) or outsource it (pay landscaping company to cut it).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJXrXf-0yoQ
People laugh, and it is a bit funny, but it's also deadly serious.
True heroism receives no ovation. It's just you against the world with no one to see or cheer.
The sadly-late Norm Macdonald was a good proponent.
Fwiw though I watched this after your post and I'd say that's not really the same. I'm not sure what you call this technique in speeches with such a setup but it adds great emotional gravity and is something I see and appreciate a lot in speeches like this (or even shows like The Good Place which is incredible but can't be described further without spoilers).
He's such a smug intellectual brat HOWEVER he's fully self-aware of his personality shortcomings and seems to set his qualms and enjoy himself despite of himself by the end.
https://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/HarpersMagazi...
But the part describing the teacher who wanted to kill the child was the funniest chapter of a book I’ve ever read. And I recommend this book based only on this one chapter.
I have never seen this kind of comedy in a book. Maybe something like it’s always sunny in Philadelphia or futurama comes slightly close. But I’ve never laughed out loud from a book like that.
I just found that dehumanizing. Lol
If nothing else, I once read a comment somewhere online that noted that the constant back-and-forth from text to endnotes and back is physically analogous to a back-and-forth in a tennis match. If thematic consistency in the third dimension was actually something DFW was going for, it's a shame you're only seeing half of the court.
I found it annoying initially, but after I read that (when I was maybe 1/3 through), I did come to appreciate it a bit more. Maybe I'm just impressionable.
I haven't read it in ~10 years but I think it's even more relevant, poignant, and hilarious today as it was then since we're just seeing more and more of his predictions about consumerism and self-image come to life.
But I totally agree that it just gets more and more relevant and poignant. And completely hilarious. I think that part of the book (and his writing in general0 is undersold. Some of the passages are amusing because of their literary references and wordplay, some are laugh-out-loud funny, the type of stuff that you'll have to read back to someone else immediately because of the extreme mirth you just experienced reading it.
> A Wallace reader gets the impression of being in a room with a very talkative and brilliant uncle or cousin who, just when he's about to push it too far, to try our patience with too much detail, has the good sense to throw in a good lowbrow joke.
Incredibly prescient.
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If you write like this yourself it's no wonder you'd find it readable. Or in other words I see what you did there.
It's one of my favorites.
[0] http://artsites.ucsc.edu/faculty/gustafson/FILM20P.W11/readi...
The content is mostly the same, seems like the release of the latter was a cash grab.
Probably the main recurring scene involves an extended conversation between Remy Marathe and Hugh Steeply on a hilltop overlooking Tuscon. Marathe is a legless French Canadian agent of uncertain allegiance and Steeply is a US agent posing as a female reporter called Helen. Closely following the back-and-forth between the two allows the reader to put together major aspects of the grand narrative of the novel.
My favorite scene was a one-off involving the younger kids (pre-teens) at a tennis academy playing an extraordinarily convoluted and physically intense game called Eschaton (think Risk played with tennis gear). If any particular thing made the 1,000 page slog worthwhile, I would say it had to be that.
The footnotes alone could have made up an entire book.
The Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, if you will.
And a band that apparently has some David Foster Wallace fans amongst its members did a music video based on that chapter:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ni7T18UUBUI (The Decemberists - "Calamity Song")
> I sometimes wish Wallace had never written on irony or given that famous commencement address. Both are unfairly used as a stand-in for his entire ideology. He is in turn praised and totally dismissed by large groups of people who have no idea what his larger project as a writer really was. Also I'm pretty sure that he's made it abundantly clear that he never meant to say irony has no proper place in society, merely that it becomes a crutch and a shield for many who would rather not engage earnestly with the world. - https://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/274v9c/what_han...
https://medium.com/@kunaljasty/a-lost-1996-interview-with-da...
I think that's the point of much of his works:
> Wallace’s great subject was the morass of selfishness, self-rationalization, and intellectualized narcissism into which his cohort of educated, relatively privileged Americans would sink—and were sinking—unless they could find something to love more than they loved themselves.
While the article makes sense to me, there's plenty of filler that detracts from the point. Wallace's work was writing moral fiction for a generation ahead of his time. Many of the themes in his work are more prevalent and pervasive today than they were at the time he wrote them.
> Subsequent first-person accounts came from Wallace’s friends...
>...They also produced a fairly consistent picture of a selfish friend, a manipulative—and likely abusive—boyfriend, and a jealous and self-mythologizing writer. Even were we to desire to do so, there is no way to read Wallace today without knowing these things about him.
> It’s worth noting, though, that for attentive readers of Wallace’s fiction, little of the news about his personal life could come as a surprise. Wallace’s great subject was the morass of selfishness, self-rationalization, and intellectualized narcissism into which his cohort of educated, relatively privileged Americans would sink—and were sinking—unless they could find something to love more than they loved themselves. A difference between Wallace and many of his contemporaries—one that sometimes opened him to charges of hypocrisy and self-delusion, not to mention cringeworthy sentimentalism—was his commitment to doing more than merely cataloguing the traps of modern alienation. This did not mean that he claimed to have escaped those traps himself. It did mean, as reflected by his attraction to conversion narratives like Fogle’s, that he hoped he could spring his readers free.
That this was a predictable facet of DFW's character doesn't make his purported actions less saddening and hurtful.
It's okay--expected!--to struggle. It's common--awful, but repairable!--to hurt others in the process. The open question is whether that repair would have ever been available had he lived.
This is new to me -- anyone have an example?
I totally care about those other factors. And I am acutely aware of the effect that physical abuse has on real, actual people. It's unavoidable that this would effect my reading of someone's work.
That the writers of the Constitution were morally fallible means they weren't the final authority, and we should be willing to grow. They had wisdom; we should take what we can of it, and take a nuanced view. This is no different from my take on DFW: there's art and learning to be had, but it's no longer the pure and innocent enjoyment I would have had prior to knowing how personally hurtful he could be.
The MLK stuff is uncertain as yet; the FBI was clearly trying to blackmail him, but the records remain sealed. We'll know more in a couple years: https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/1997/summer/e...
All you crave is ignorance. The reality is that everyone has personal failings of some kind. All the bridges, all the books, all the artworks were made by imperfect people that were sometimes assholes.
The good he did is enough. One doesn’t have to be perfect for one's works to be good.
That said, I found Infinite Jest to be very insightful when I read it at a low point in my life, but I went into it knowing who the author was.
On the politics of language:
http://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/HarpersMagazine-2001-0...
Ie : This brush stroke is aesthetic. This deed is moral.
Both boil down to feeling-of-rightness.
But ya, that larger context. Maybe Dave is telling artists to get out of the studio.