I really enjoyed reading this Maria Bustillos piece on David Foster Wallace’s heavily annotated collection of self-help books.
One surprise was the number of popular self-help books in the collection, and the care and attention with which he read and reread them. I mean stuff of the best-sellingest, Oprah-level cheesiness and la-la reputation was to be found in Wallace’s library. Along with all the Wittgenstein, Husserl and Borges, he read John Bradshaw, Willard Beecher, Neil Fiore, Andrew Weil, M. Scott Peck and Alice Miller. Carefully.
I haven’t read Infinite Jest since Wallace killed himself in 2008. Part of it is that I just don’t have the time, but part of it is a fear that the book just doesn’t work anymore. It’s one thing for the protagonist to become incomprehensible to everyone but himself, but quite another for him to take his own life.
I don’t know what I would make of the book today. It’s probably been twelve years since I plodded my way through it (and don’t kid yourself, as enjoyable as the book is, it is hard work to get through it). Hal Incandenza was clearly modeled on Wallace himself, which only becomes more clear as more of Wallace’s inner life is revealed by his highlighting and annotating of these self-help books. Knowing that Hal ultimately kills himself must now weigh heavily on any reading of the book, changing the meaning, possibly fatally. Knowing that The Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House and all the 12-step programs in the world couldn’t save Incandenza’s life must tarnish and cast doubt on one of Wallace’s central purposes in writing the book.
I don’t know. I’d like to read it again and see what’s different. For starters, I’m different. I’m older; I’m a parent. Of course, it’s because I’m a parent that I will probably have to wait twenty years to take up Infinite Jest again. It’s still the most impressive book I’ve read written originally in the English language.
Booman, Hal doesn’t kill himself. I’ve read it twice, that’s not in there. His father killed himself. Hal is also not in the recovery house or any 12 step program. So what you’re saying basically makes no sense.
Definitely read it again. It’s easier to follow all the threads, plus you can skip over the occasional scenes that don’t work for you (for me it’s the endless discussion between Helen Steeply and Marathe). The author of the piece you mention seems to argue that the AA stuff in Infinite Jest was primarily based on personal experience, but this is just simplistic and wrong for an author like Wallace. Wallace certainly brought a lot of his own experience to writing, but he also did do a ton a unmistakable reportorial research for the book, adding in massive amounts of genius invention. So the personal interpretation is sort of interesting but also besides the point. I hate to speculate on someone’s suicide but my understanding is that Wallace had terrible organic depression which he was unable to control at the end of his life.
Hal=DFW
DFW killed himself.
Ergo…Hal ultimately killed himself. After the book was over, naturally.
Sorry to confuse with my post.
It would take a long time to explain what I am saying explicitly.
What I was trying to say is that the hopeful, redemptive message of the book is undermined by fact that the author ultimately succumbed to his depression.
What this means is that nothing worked, and therefore the paths to redemption in the book failed.
Hal is really just Wallace himself. So, not only does Hal go mad (in the book) but he kills himself just like his father (in real life).
The extensive sensitive treatment of the recovery culture that seems to work despite all its bullshit, ultimately didn’t work. Therefore its dignity and utility is undermined.
These are the points I am making. I hope that is a little clearer.
Yes, that’s clearer. I just think your attempt to read Wallace’s life into his work (or vice versa) doesn’t stand up to much critical scrutiny. It’s an impoverished mode of interpretation/response, which is also extremely dubious in many of its assumptions.
As just one example, I would strongly disagree that the book has a “redemptive message”.
Well, for me, the possibility of redemption exists in the book, or at the very least the possibility of survival. And it is represented through Alcoholics Anonymous. If you skip the irrelevant discussion up-top about post-modernism this essay does a nice job of tackling what I’m talking about. Of course, for the purposes of seeing the book as autobiographical, it is important to see Hal and Gately as some kind of Jeckyl and Hyde combination of forces, each struggling to cope in two different worlds.
Or, you have the brilliant athletic good looking wonderboy on the one hand who is eager to please but secretly insecure in the extreme. And then you have the pathetic wretch who can’t control his appetites and feels he’s utterly worthless, but who manages to keep his addictions hidden to the people in the respectable world.
And, of course, in the book the wonderboy sinks and sink and sinks while the wretch rises and rises until he has taken over the narrative and the other has gone mute.
and there is the tension between the super-intellect and its natural contempt for the seemingly-simplistic bullshit that makes AA actually work for people.
I was reminded of how stark this is in the linked essay.
But, hey, this is mainly the impression it gave me that has lasted the intervening twelve years since I read it.
It’s familiar to me because I come out of the same hyper-intellectualized culture as Wallace, even when it comes to playing competitive tennis in my young teens. And I have friends and acquaintances who have gone into recovery by necessity and have either failed to succeed because they couldn’t humble themselves or have come away, like Wallace, deeply humbled that they had as much to learn from the drecks of society as they did from the Classics and all their university friends. I think that something along these lines is the redemptive message of IJ, along with obviously a call to turn off the Entertainment and seek something deeper than superficial happiness.
Ok, now I’m not sure again what you’re saying.
Can you boil it down?
Boil it down?
Maybe, but it won’t benefit much from brevity.
DFW was tormented by two major things.
First, he was always the smartest, cleverest, most-talented kid in the room, but this only created intense pressure on him. He both doubted he was really so great and felt guilty that he was so exceptional.
Second, he became an addict and lost control. This made him feel all the more certain that he didn’t deserve praise, that he wasn’t exceptional, that he lacked self-worth, that he wasn’t deserving of love, and that even his talent was a fraud.
These two aspects of his personality are played out in Infinite Jest in the two main characters.
At the time he wrote it, he felt like AA had saved his life and, not only that, it had taught him that he had just as much to learn from the people at the bottom of society (those in recovery in the meetings with him) as he had from studying philosophy and mathematics and grammar at our most elite universities. He wanted to share his insight. He was terrified of his own elitism and how he’d be perceived, which comes through in all his interviews.
So, what’s woven into IJ is a story of anti-elitist redemption through the anti-intellectual structure and narrative of AA.
But, the shit didn’t save him. He killed himself anyway. And that makes it harder to buy what he was selling.
Like I said, this explanation suffers from its brevity, but it’s a stab at giving you my meaning.
Without getting too complicated, I think I see what you’re saying. DFW was not perfect as a writer. One of his problems is a kind of precious or cloying self-awareness. an over cleverness. But I think it’s simply not defensible to boil down the message of IJ as the redemption through AA. I mean, for one thing, he talks at length about all the complex, deep questions people have about this recovery process. To say that the redemption message is unproblematic in IJ really doesn’t do this capacious epic justice, to put it mildly. (To me what it foresees is not an anti-intellectual message but a path of eastern-style enlightenment, with many paradoxical and mystical overcomings of intellectual dead ends.) I think it would be valuable for you to read it again, if only to have a better sense of the masterful formal creation it is, with unquestionably much of the greatest writing of the last 25 years.
Yeah, I wouldn’t really want to boil it down it any simple message at all, but one of the key themes of the book is that on some level intellectual answers are not going to save you from annihilation. And that’s a complicated thing right away because another central message is that we’re annihilating ourselves with entertainment. But, you know, scoffing at Fox News and late night comedians and every form of phoniness is cold comfort and it won’t keep you from consoling yourself to death with drugs or alcohol.
It would do a thing to fend off soul-crushing depression.
So, what’s the answer? And the answer seems to lie in finding what works, and what works is to break everything down in the now-nuggets so that the crushing march of time is endurable.
And the model for that is AA, which does this for the addict so the addict can face the rest of their life without their crutch.
So, I guess I’m saying that his theory failed in his own life and therefore is less compelling now that I know that.