Infinite Sorrow

In Memory of David Foster Wallace

Fifteen years ago, David Foster Wallace committed suicide. I haven’t seen any tributes posted on the internet today, so I decided to write one.

Disclaimer: This is not a puff piece. After he died, a lot of his fans wrote tributes that all but canonized the man, but Wallace abused his longtime girlfriend, jerked people around (watch the movie The End of the Tour to see what I mean), and had an egomaniacal streak. He wasn’t a saint; he wasn’t even a very good man. But he had a gift that ought to be remembered and celebrated, so here goes:

Depending on which critic you read, Wallace’s Infinite Jest was either the Great American Novel or a disorganized compendium of things that popped into the author’s head. I was 21 when I read it, and at the time, I was in the first camp. Now, I’m torn. Some of the metafictional stuff in the novel— like using a “metanarrative” instead of a plot, fracturing the story with hundreds of endnotes, and omitting an ending— struck me, then, as brilliant. The older, less starry-eyed Stan finds all that gimmicky. Still, parts of Infinite Jest are ingenious. Wallace predicted both Trump (in the character of Johnny Gentle) and COVID-paranoia:

“C.U.S.P. a kind of post-Perot national joke for three years…. suddenly swept to quadrennial victory in an angry reactionary voter-spasm that made the U.W.S.A. and LaRouchers and Libertarians chew their hands in envy as the Dems and G.O.P.s stood on either side watching dumbly, like doubles partners who each think the other's surely got it, the two established mainstream parties split open along tired philosophical lines in a dark time when all landfills got full and all grapes were raisins and sometimes in some places the falling rain clunked instead of splatted, and also, recall, a post-Soviet and -Jihad era when — somehow even worse — there was no real Foreign Menace of any real unified potency to hate and fear, and the U.S. sort of turned on itself and its own philosophical fatigue and hideous redolent wastes with a spasm of panicked rage that in retrospect seems possible only in a time of geopolitical supremacy and consequent silence, the loss of any external Menace to hate and fear. This motionless face on the E.T.A. screen is Johnny Gentle, Third-Party stunner. Johnny Gentle, the first U.S. President ever to swing his microphone around by the cord during his Inauguration speech. Whose new white-suited Office of Unspecified Services' retinue required Inauguration-attendees to scrub and mask and then walk through chlorinated footbaths as at public pools.”

I’d wager that this, written in 1996, is more incisive than 90% of journalistic commentary on Trump’s first election. It’s not hard to imagine the Donald swinging his mic around by the cord, either.

Infinite Jest is not an easy read. It took me six months to get through its 1,100 pages, and grasping the book’s bare meaning was so hard that I didn’t try to dredge any symbolism, allusions, or intertextual tomfoolery out of it. But maybe I should, because once in a while I found something buried in the text that made me wonder how much I was missing. For example, after describing a scene too traumatic and disturbing to quote, Wallace writes that his character joined a support group: The Wounded, Hurting, Inadequately-Nurtured, but Ever-Recovering Survivors.

Read the support group’s name again. What does the acronym spell?

It’s a good joke— if I’d written it, I’d want to be sure my readers found it, but in Infinite Jest it’s not obvious. I stumbled on it by accident, and since then I’ve wondered how much else is hidden in those pages.

Then there are Wallace’s descriptions, probably his greatest asset as a writer. My favorite was him on tennis players: “sitting with their elbows on their knees in the defecatory posture of all athletes at rest.” Next time you watch a game, look at the sidelines. You’ll see exactly what Wallace meant, and you’ll never unsee it.

In the end, I don’t know whether Infinite Jest is a Great Book. But it’s a great entertainment, and it’s filled with insights. If you have the time and mental energy, read it. But first, read Wallace’s essays, which are better than his novels. He could bring life to topics like math, grammar, and competitive baton twirling. Recently I reread Consider the Lobster and found myself excited to read about a four-volume Dostoevsky biography, the 2000 McCain presidential campaign, and similarly insipid crap, because Wallace’s prose is fun. He combines idioms, obscure words, vulgarities, and technical jargon effortlessly, and he wielded adjectives in a way that will make you laugh out loud, and then think.

He also belongs to a funny group of writers, along with C.S. Lewis, Ray Bradbury, and Willa Cather, who weren’t Catholic but should have been. Here’s a quote from Infinite Jest:

"‘Freedom! Freedom!’ as if it were obvious to all people what it wants to mean, this word. But look: it is not so simple as that. Your freedom is the freedom-from: no one tells your precious individual U.S.A. selves what they must do. It is this meaning only, this freedom from constraint and forced duress…But what of the freedom-to? Not just free-from. Not all compulsion comes from without. You pretend you do not see this. What of freedom-to. How for the person to freely choose? How to choose any but a child's greedy choices if there is no loving-filled father to guide, inform, teach the person how to choose? How is there freedom to choose if one does not learn how to choose?’”

This is basically the Catholic critique of America’s Constitution. In the Church’s eyes, true freedom is the freedom to choose what’s right, and consists as much in conquering vice as in resisting outside control. Wallace voiced this criticism way before it became trendy with conservative Catholics, and I’d be surprised if he was familiar with the Church’s pre-Vatican II criticisms of liberalism. More likely, Wallace unwittingly found his way to a deeply Catholic point of view.

Next, check out Wallace’s criticism of a John Updike novel:

“[Turnbull, the narrator] persists in the bizarre, adolescent belief that getting to have sex with whomever one wants whenever one wants is a cure for human despair. And [Updike], so far as I can figure out, believes it too…. I am not shocked or offended by this attitude; I mostly just don’t get it… Turnbull’s unhappiness is obvious right from the novel’s first page. It never once occurs to him, though, that the reason he’s so unhappy is that he’s an asshole.”

Edgier than Theology of the Body, but the thrust is the same: chastity leads to happiness; hedonism leads to misery.

Here’s Wallace in his commencement speech at Kenyon College:

"If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness. Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful, it's that they're unconscious. They are default settings. They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing….The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day. That is real freedom. That is being educated and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.”

Someone tweak this and put it in a homily. Seriously.

Lastly, a pithy one from Infinite Jest:

“The truth will set you free. But not until it’s finished with you.”

Very, very accurate. Unfortunately, the truth never set Wallace free. He flirted with the Catholic Church, but never joined, and while he attended Protestant services, you can tell from his writings (and life) that he didn’t see Christ as his Savior. All the same, what I’ve learned from Wallace has, I think, made me a better Catholic. May the Lord’s mercy embrace him.