The Rewriting of David Foster Wallace | Hacker News Reader

The Rewriting of David Foster Wallace

vulture.com

54 pointssamclemens41 comments

A large part of Wallace’s appeal, for me anyway, was that you could always tell that he was kind of an asshole, ever on the verge of being cruel, and not just to himself. Banishing contempt entirely may be a good way to live, but it’s another kind of death for writing. Which is one reason it’s worth remembering, as the image of Wallace as slacker saint and liberal sage hardens into Hemingwayesque concrete, that he was a Reagan voter and a Perot supporter; a jealous guy who once contemplated buying a gun to knock off a woman’s husband; and a person who put to paper both the notion that the “good thing” about 9/11 was that it brought Americans together, and that “AIDS’s gift to us lies in its loud reminder that there’s nothing casual about sex at all.” Wallace never wanted that piece republished in a collection — in fact, he wanted it forgotten. He’d probably be the last person to argue for his own sainthood.

This is the DFW that always has jumped out starkly clear to me from the pages, ever since I hit on the "Yours Truly" chapters in IJ. People who try to spin him as some trans-human wise sage of universalism seem to me like the people who see Jesus in toast.

He was an excellent writer, and he hit numerous home runs ("How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart" resonates with me particularly). However, I still think he would've been better if he developed less bland stances than his "apolitical but vaguely pro-status quo" fare. His romanticizing of the goodness of "Middle America", as in "The View from Ms. Thompson's" (about 9/11), is probably him at his worst.

I had a similar experience. People had really pumped him up for me, and yet essay after essay left me either cold or disgusted. As someone who has struggled with lifelong depression, I still didn't recognize anything familiar in his description of watching hours of television a day, and I couldn't agree less with his moralizing attacks on irony. And his piece on prescriptivism vs. descriptivism is basically nonsense.

But it was the 9/11 essay that made me give up on him. Not just its stunning lack of insight as to what America's reaction to the attacks was and would lead to, although that was bad enough. But there's this point where he mentions that the people he was staying with didn't know where various buildings in NY were in relation to the Twin Towers; he explicitly describes his hosts' ignorance of the layout of the NYC financial district as a sign of their parochialism and isolation. What amazes me is that the eternally self-reflective Wallace apparently never considered that the vast majority of Americans, parochial and cosmopolitan alike, never have had any reason to know anything about the layout of the NYC financial district. In that moment the parochial viewpoint was _his_.

DFW was a fine stylist and made the occasional apt observation, but the man doesn't even begin to live up to the myth. The best thing I can say about him is that he would have been the first to admit that, too.

> As someone who has struggled with lifelong depression, I still didn't recognize anything familiar in his description of watching hours of television a day

Since I wrote elsewhere that I feel DFW's writing captures depression well, this might be a good place to clarify: I don't mean that his characters act the way I might act when I'm depressed, except maybe in caricature. I mean he writes in a way I might think about things when I'm depressed.

To put it another way, I don't agree with much of what he has to say, yet it resonates.

The Midwestern-NYC ignorance was a minor part of a minor work, but have you ventured into his fiction? Despite the caricature/myth he's turned into, you don't get to that point without delivering the goods, and Infinite Jest certainly did.

Stylistically it's an achievement, but moreover it had some pretty concrete and incredibly relevant things to say about modern life's alienation and addictions and the need for raw, earnest, emotional connections with other people.

What's wrong with Middle America?

The same general sorts of things that are wrong and right with human beings of all types. Hence "romanticizing the goodness of" being observed as the issue.

I guess so, but that doesn't seem like a bad thing to do right after a terrorist attack.

This excerpt from the article is relevant to your reaction:

In a letter to a student who pointed out that the chubby Midwesterners in his State Fair essay seemed “animal-like,” he answered, ashamedly, “It’s death if the biggest sense the reader gets from a critical essay is that the narrator’s a very critical person, or from a comic essay that the narrator’s cruel or snooty. Hence the importance of being just as critical about oneself as one is about the stuff/people one’s being critical of.”

What I'm getting at is that there were certainly times when DFW did say some pretty wise things, not because he was a wise sage, but because I think he sat and thought about certain aspects of life deeply. So, I'm not sure why you would have a one-sided impression of him as an asshole. Similarly, he certainly did write things that sounded like he was on the verge of wanting to go off on people, not because he was an asshole, but because he was clinically depressed. Anyway, I guess you've chosen only to remember one side of his personality, so it sounds a bit disingenuous. I don't expect people, especially in fiction, to have a flat-line, monotonous personality. A story, after all, needs to make things interesting and the mechanics of it require some tension.

We can sit and judge his personality when giving interviews, where most of the time he appeared pretty calm, maybe due to the fact that he was medicated--I'm not sure--but it would be a pretty useless exercise that kind of reduces everything to gossip.

His political opinions don't make him a worse or better writer. I mean, do semi-popular writers or artists have to always have a hard-lined opinion on something? He seems pretty liberal and, at the very least, not a right-wing conservative nutcase in the 2003 German interview on ZDF, if that helps any.

The problem is that what passes for intellectual thought on the internet is pretty much just fashion. I think "hit pieces" and "edgy" are just hot now for whatever reason. Vice seems to have made a good go with "edgy" material and others have followed. I imagine DFW is an easy target for millennials not terribly impressed by the 90s or whatever Gen-X was supposed to be back then.

I'm surprised by the vitriol in this thread as well. DFW has always been kinda an interesting but somewhat boring smart guy and never this politicized character or self-help guru the article makes him or his legacy out to be.

I also think these calls for being a conservative really reflect the extremist leftist times we are in. DFW was something of a liberal moderate and sometimes played up the positive side of traditionalism. Nowadays, in the age of "trigger warnings", tumblr brigading, outrage politics, and mindless social media; being anything but a leftist revolutionary who hates everything is a liability. DFW never sought to toss the baby out with the bathwater and that's an unforgivable sin today it seems.

> that he was a Reagan voter and a Perot supporter

In the context of the other items in the same list, that comes across as "Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking" http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ArsonMurderAndJay... ; it doesn't fit. Even "jaywalking" is too strong here, since even that is not comparable to "held political opinions differing from those of the person writing the article".

In a 2011 New Yorker essay, Franzen named Wallace’s relationship to his own fame as the central battle of his adult life. He also gave voice to more than one “interpretation” of Wallace’s death that most journalists have been careful to avoid and many others probably found unseemly, that Wallace “had died of boredom and in despair about his future novels”; that his suicide “took the person away from us,” his loved ones, “and made him into a very public legend”; and that he had therefore, in hanging himself, “chosen the adulation of strangers over the love of the people closest to him.” Franzen said it might well have been “suicide as career move” — the “Kurt Cobain route.”

Based on firsthand accounts of what Wallace suffered, this seems like an irresponsible account of his death to run unqualified --- though it fits with the rest of the one-note cynicism that runs through the article.

Wallace had a life-long struggle with clinical depression, and was hospitalized in his 20s. He was for years on a regimen of Nardil, a third-line medication for treatment-resistant depression. The major depressive episode that preceded his suicide appears to have been triggered by an effort to wean himself off the drug.

Mental illness is a real thing. Just as Steve Jobs cancer didn't make him a martyr to tech and Keith Haring's AIDS didn't make him a martyr to art, succumbing to clinical depression doesn't make Wallace "Kurt Cobain" or his death a "career move".

The whole article bugs me, with its shrill hipsterism, a literary version of Courtney Love's "REM's important work was done before they signed to IRS". On a limb: I think the article itself is doing the same thing it accuses the world of doing by rewriting any sincerity out of the stuff people like about Wallace's writing. This despite the fact that in addition to being by all accounts kind of a dick, Wallace was also apparently just a "treacly" kind of dude, as the essays he wrote in Normal, IL indicate.

I agree with your point. But as far as I know Franzen was one of his real life friends (in the New Yorker essay Franzen says he was given DFW's ashes to spread) and maybe has special insight into this particular situation.

The circumstances leading up to Wallace's death have been documented by his family in great detail, in fact-checked reported stories. Just prior to his suicide, Wallace suffered an intense, crippling bout of depression, during which his parents flew to Claremont to watch him. According to the same accounts, in the year before that, he was weaned off Nardil, suffered a relapse of depression, tried to resume his old Nardil regime, and found the drug had become ineffective.

I agree; furthermore, I think the author skewed Franzen's take to be more cynical than it was:

I imagine the side of David that advocated going the Kurt Cobain route speaking in the seductively reasonable voice of the devil in “The Screwtape Letters,” which was one of David’s favorite books, and pointing out that death by his own hand would simultaneously satisfy his loathsome hunger for career advantage and, because it would represent a capitulation to the side of himself that his embattled better side perceived as evil, further confirm the justice of his death sentence.

This is not to say that he spent his last months and weeks in lively intellectual conversation with himself, à la Screwtape or the Grand Inquisitor. He was so sick, toward the end, that every new waking thought of his, on whatever subject, immediately corkscrewed into the same conviction of his worthlessness, causing him continual dread and pain.

Franzen's take, IMO, was less suicide as final career move and more suicide as final act of self-loathing and rejection of last remnants of positivity.

I think the difference between the quote you've highlighted and the one in the article speaks for itself. Thanks.

This is similar to how Elliot Smith died. He was getting off his medications for whatever reason. Apparently, he was also getting off booze, red meat, sugar, etc and I guess was trying to live a more "natural" life.

There's probably something to be said about how we handle weening off drugs or switching drugs for the depressed. Suicide becomes a real risk during these periods. Its no more romantic or meaningful than this. Withdrawal and being without a drug that keeps depression away leads to bad things sometimes. Apparently, an artist can't even die without his or her death being seen as an artistic statement or part of the 'suffering' of being a creative person.

"He died because of low serotonin leading to suicide," doesn't sell a lot of ad impressions I guess.

Maybe it's just me -- and I never met the man -- but I've never had someone convince me they understood what it's like to be terminally depressed as completely as the writing of DFW. It boggles my mind that someone could miss or misbelieve that.

The way that "This is Water" speech/pamphlet is brought up in particular horrifies me. Hindsight granted, it's always read to me as someone who, stuck in a deep, dark hole for so long, has given up on finding a way out. Blaming himself for being there in the first place. Standing so close to an answer, but unable to see it. And we know how the story ends.

It's a feeling I know well, and I'm routinely shocked how people without (I assume) first-hand experience with depression can completely ignore the darkness there, and see something banal or even encouraging.

I don't love the Kenyan College address as much as a lot of people do, but the idea that it's treacle, or a depressive's accounting of the tribulations of going to a grocery store (and one wonders: how can it be both?) seems like horseshit. To me, it seems like a pretty straightforward recapitulation of the ideas behind cognitive behavioral therapy, which Wallace probably had more than a passing familiarity with.

To answer your rhetorical: It can be both because depression makes boring things terrifying in a way non-depressed people find boring again. shrug

Anyway, I don't want to go too deeply into this, so I'll just say you're actually not far off from what I'm saying. What saddens me about "This is Water" is the fact that it's so close to something that might have been really helpful to him. He's talking about these daily experiences, and noticing how he's feeling. He feels bad. That's good; feeling bad helps.

And what he thinks next is... You have a choice of how to feel. Think about everyone who feels even worse. You can decide what you care about. Don't think of an elephant.

That isn't CBT, nor anything therapeutic-- that's depression, at its most pernicious and deadly.

I love the Kenyon address more than any other piece of writing I can think of. I don't read any particular complexity or symbolic meaning into it other than the seemingly revolutionary idea that all the people in the world with you are pursuing their own goals, and are harried by their own demons, and are basically doing the best they can in the circumstances they're in, so maybe you should be a little bit charitable to them, in your own mind, and by extension charitable to yourself.

The attitude taken toward that speech, and by extension toward that sentiment, by the smug asshole in TOA makes me almost fighting mad.

> I've never had someone convince me they understood what it's like to be terminally depressed as completely as the writing of DFW.

Just wanted to repeat that, because it's how I feel as well. It's why I consider his writing to be among the best I've ever read; not because of the hyper-literacy (although that's pretty fun too), but because of the level of insight effectively shared.

I'd agree with you if it had been 'run unqualified'——but in the very next paragraph the author seems to (strongly) disagree with that hypothesis.

I would also say that 'shrill hipsterism' is a nebulous complaint.

Agree with everything else!

Sorry, I assume everyone works from the same definition of "hipsterism" as me, but that's obviously silly. Think of it as encapsulating: "I don't really like this artist. Lots of normal people like them, now. But they like them for the wrong reasons." The "nobody goes there anymore it's too crowded" trope, with an added sprinkling of "and did you know he supported Republicans?" (Yeah, thinking maybe the book about the first McCain campaign might have been a tip-off for you there.)

Wallace was also intensely smart. To kill yourself as such an intelligent person is to be an implicit advocate for suicide. It is, inherently, a selfish move, and it is very unlikely he would not have recognized that.

I have struggled with similar issues my whole life. It is right to empathize with his depression, but it is just as disrespectful (in my opinion) to prescribe any thoughts to his suicide. Everyone experiences different aspects of depression and he was no different. In his world, the lack of opportunity or interest may have literally killed him.

I think it says much more about you to say that this judgement is unnecessarily harsh. Franzen undoubtedly loved his friend, even if they had a strange relationship through their passion for writing and Americans. I truly believe that this is, at least in part, Franzen's effort to pay respects to his friend.

Suicide as a consequence of diagnosed clinical depression is no more "a selfish move" than the fatal stroke that concludes a bout with metastatic cancer.

Thank you. I hear suicide referred to as "selfish" so often that I can hardly understand what it means.

Ascribing value judgements on people suffering from very personal diseases doesn't help and may actually prevent folks with suicidal ideations from getting help.

If you think that telling a clinically depressed person that what they're thinking about doing is "selfish" is going to "snap them out of it" then I'd recommend you do some soul searching.

> If you think that telling a clinically depressed person that what they're thinking about doing is "selfish" is going to "snap them out of it" then I'd recommend you do some soul searching.

Agreed, but this is very different from an objective analysis of why someone killed themselves.

No, the problem is that selfish moves are looked down upon. Ignore that all moves are selfish, at their root, but if you're acting purely to end your own experience without considering the consequences, that is by definition selfish.

I think he articulated his thoughts about suicidal depression with incredible lucidity in Infinite Jest. This passage is etched in my memory. It haunts me and in a way I found it a bit of a relief that despite ongoing depression issues, I could not relate:

“The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.”

It's nicely written. How do we know if there's any truth to it? Does it draw on research into suicide messages? Does it draw on interviews with people who survived a suicide attempt?

Suicide kills many people and while I welcome some discussion of suicide it's important to be aware of the stuff that tries to be truthy and the stuff that feels good.

It probably does draw on research. He had a lot of engagement with the mental health system. He suffered from depression. His experience with clinical psychology leaks into a lot of his writing.

I’m not a fan of the tone of this article, at least the first half or so. Its got something of a “if you hadn’t read Infinite Jest before Wallace died then you aren’t a true fan” vibe to it.

Is it really such a terrible thing that people who hadn’t heard about DFW while he was alive are seeing and enjoying his This Is Water speech? I think it does a good job of describing how easy it is to fall into a pattern of letting the world around you control how you feel on a minute-to-minute basis. Yeah he ties the whole idea up too neatly, but it’s a commencement speech not a long form essay.

Sure, there are probably plenty of people out there putting DFW up on a “tortured artist too brilliant for this world” pedestal. But I think the author isn’t giving people enough credit to assume that is the only reason for his recent popular appeal. Maybe people stumbled upon the This Is Water video, watched it, and it inspired them to think a bit differently about their own thought process and feelings.

You don’t need to have consumed everything an artist has produced to be inspired by one of them.

Here's an amazing commencement speech by David. Definitely worth a listen. https://soundcloud.com/cloudroutine/this-is-water-david-fost...

I admire DFW's writing a lot but I have to say that I largely agree with this critique of that speech (from the posted article):

"To me, it’s the least interesting version of himself he ever put to the page. But an unquantifiable number of online readers, millions of YouTube viewers, and thousands of bookstore shoppers disagree. Among the more dispiriting aspects of the Wallace canonization is how much it has been built out of his suffering — the way the cult has revived, for precisely the post-therapy, post-Romantic, self-help-soaked culture Wallace described and intermittently deplored, the Romantic picture of the depressive as a kind of keen-eyed saint."

Did you even read the article before posting that?

almost certainly not.

My stomach sank at reading the GP comment, to have missed the exact point the article was making. (I almost wonder if it was intentional?)

But then somehow it is so appropriate to DFW that an article about him becoming a caricature of a writer and bemoaning that speech in particular produced that particular comment, a sort of circular irony or something that I almost imagine he'd appreciate.

Actually kind of a meta-parody about the idea that no one's actually read IJ.

Its borderline shameful you've been downvoted solely because someone at "vulture.com" thinks that speech is too "treacly" and doesn't represent whatever "real" view of DFW we're supposed to have. Yeah, he wasn't a liberal, he was a Reagan voter and didn't buy into the boomer hypocritical 60's freelove liberalism that was dying out by the 90s (and rightfully so by me). I think today's liberals and far left can't stand that. Why isn't he one of us? How can someone critical of causal sex, liberal politics, etc also have an somewhat enlightened view of how people work and how people should work all picked up from what seems popularized Eastern thought and heaps of cognitive behavioral therapy. We don't tolerate those who aren't like us it seems!

As a snide note, my god, if you go against the far left on social media which is almost totally ruled by college identity politics, expect a harsh reaction. I read some really disingenuous hit pieces here and elsewhere about Chicago's recent election and statements about Rahm that were somewhat if not mostly unfair and a complete and utter obedience to Chuy, who was the epitome of an empty suit protest candidate. Pointing any of this out simply was not allowed. Chicagoans voted and kicked Chuy to the curb but if you read only social media you'd think he won in a landslide. I can see how kids today look at DFW's moderate if not sometimes conservative politics as some kind of betrayal and his pieces romanticizing middle America as "giving in to the man" or some other crap. This article really seems to resonate with that crowd who really like to over-politicize everything, lower the discourse level, and bully those who they disagree with.

So, someone at vulture.com said its terrible, so now we downvote in earnest. There's a real idiocy here and appeal to authority that has always bothered me about sites like HN and reddit where opinions expressed via up and down votes are often just stemming from a fairly emotional place. "How dare you link to something the article said was crap? Enjoy your downvotes!" Its so petty and uncritical.

Article: "post-therapy, post-Romantic, self-help-soaked culture Wallace described and intermittently deplored, the Romantic picture of the depressive as a kind of keen-eyed saint"

This is just a bullshit statement. Wallace was a lot of things, and in the role of giving a commencement speech he played up being a mature adult laying down some wisdom for the graduating class. How this suddenly makes him some kind of self-help guru is beyond me. I also don't see how anyone could ever seee him as 'hip' or 'post-romantic'; he came off as a super nerdy goon with poor social skills in all his interviews, hell his Charlie Rose interview is just hard to watch, even for fans. His other interviews are almost painful and I've never seen him try to build some kind of guru superstar image either for himself or for him by his fans. We all knew he was a messed up weirdo and somewhat, if not very, unlikeable, overly academic, overly elitist, etc.

I think the author just doesn't like DFW, which is fine, but she certainly isn't giving him a fair shake and seems to have written a fairly dull hit piece for outrage which translates often into ad impressions. Which is hilariously ironic as DFW would have satirized the hell out of treating a dead writer like this. Its just so plain-faced and mercenary faux-outrage writing, the same way anyone can write a piece about Steve Jobs being a jerk and how stupid Apple customers are. HN would see through that instantly but apparently not through this considering the upvotes and uncritical reception its gotten.

This is a very cynical guess as to why GP is being downvoted. The more obvious, straightforward reason is that the article links to this speech a mere seven sentences in. In that light, the post being downvoted adds nothing and indicates that the author probably didn't read the article at all. Commenting on something without reading it is frowned upon around here.

Maybe, but when I see hit pieces (lets just admit this is what the article is) on social media, I just see a lot of uncritical reflexive knee-jerking. "Yes, of course he was terrible! Thank you current .com tastemakers for telling me this! Christ, how did anyone like this person before you opened my eyes?" It always reminds me of crowds at the town hall in the Simpsons who are 100% swayed by every speaker at the podium. Luckily, Lisa speaks last as the voice of reason. On the web, that's rarely the case.

The rewriting of history and the political correctness polarization is so out of control, I'm not even sure we see it anymore. Thomas Edison is the millenials version of Stalin for no other reason than him being a successful businessman while the cult-favorite failed at his own, just as evil/greedy/stupid/cheap business. Or how autocratic states are so wonderful and democracy so terrible because it would be un-PC and racist to admit that the Chinese, Iranians, or Russians have significant problems themselves.

This stuff wouldn't be so bad, but once you toss in an up/down vote mechanism, the cream doesn't often float to the top. Its like lowest common denominator crap that does and if you browse this article without reading DFW's work or watching some interviews, you'd just shrug and agree he was a terrible person on some kind of moralist crusade to build himself up as some kind of guru superstar, when he was very, very far from that.

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