(The text of my remarks on David Foster Wallace, delivered January 31 at the Koret Auditorium. This was part of the San Francisco Public Library’s Writers Remembered, an annual tribute to writers who passed away in the previous year.)
David Foster Wallace didn’t just bring his own style, he brought his own relationship to words. He didn’t arrange them, like pretty things, on the page. He was not a tour guide, ushering us through neatly trimmed, topiary wordscapes. Asking us to admire them from the path.
A David Foster Wallace wordscape is a sort of wilderness, through which you can find yourself staggering, careening, losing the line of horizon. But rather than feel abandoned by a careless author, full of himself and overwriting, you get the sense that the Wallace himself is undergoing a process of discovery, of chance orientation and disorientation, very similar to yours. The territory bears his name, but it is mapless. There is creation, but there are no pretenses of control.
One critic called his massive book, Infinite Jest, “An exemplar for difficulty in contemporary fiction.” But that seems wide of the mark. That’s like calling the Grand Canyon difficult. It turns and deepens and convolutes, but its beauty comes from the fact that it does not exist for our convenience, that it is just happening. It is not difficult. It is quite simple in its way. Not even monumental, when you think about it–it’s just the groove of a single river.
Wallace’s writings were not mere verbal pyrotechnics. They were honest attempts to honestly follow thought processes. It’s just that these thought processes were, by their own nature, incredibly complex and discurvise. With Wallace, the stream of consciousness takes on the strength of a flood. It carves a canyon.
Let me illustrate. This is from his short story, Several Birds. A junkie transvestite called Poor Tony is on the subway, having a seizure:
The floor of the subway car became the ceiling of the subway car, and he was on his arched back in a waterfall of light, gagging on Old Spice and watching his tumid limbs tear-ass around the car’s interior like undone balloons. The booming Zuckung Zuckung Zuckung was his high heels’ heels drumming on the soiled floor’s tile. He heard a rushing train-roar that was no train on earth and felt a vascular roaring rushing that until the pain hit seemed like the gathering of a kind of orgasm of the head. His head inflated and creaked as it stretched. Then the pain (seizures hurt, is what few civilians have occasion to know) was the sharp end of a hammer. There was a squeak and rush of release inside his skull and something shot from him into the air and hung there and sparkled. His father knelt beside him on the ceiling in a well-rended T-shirt, extolling the Red Sox of Rice and Lynn. Tony wore summer taffeta. His poor body flopped around without authorization from headquarters. He didn’t feel one bit like a puppet. He thought of gaffed fish. The gown had a thousand flounces and a saucy bodice of crocheted lace. Then he saw his father, still green-gowned and rubber-gloved, leaning to read the headlines off the skin of a fish a newspaper had wrapped. That had never happened. The largest-print headline said “PUSH.” Poor Tony flopped and gasped and pushed down inside and the utter red of the blood that feeds sight bloomed red behind his lids. Time wasn’t passing so much as kneeling beside him in a torn T-shirt disclosing the rodent-nosed tits of a man who disdains the care of his once comely bod. Poor Tony convulsed and drummed and gasped and fluttered, a fountain of light all around him.
That’s just a portion of a single paragraph.
His recognition came early, which he regretted. “It’s a mixed blessing, finding success when you’re young,” he said. “If you aren’t published until you’re forty, THEN you’ve been through the fire.” He backed away from his fame. He didn’t stop writing, but he tried hard to stop being That Kind of writer, the Big Deal kind. After Infinite Jest, no more grand, towering edifices of books. It’s as if Frank Lloyd Wright gave up architecture to become a carpenter…a handyman around the house. Instead of imposing his imagination on us, he seemed bent on giving us what we seemed to need: more peaceable insights into other people. More empathy. His last book was about John McCain, for Chrissakes. Not agreeing with or even liking McCain, but seeing his humanity in full.
Here’s what one of his editors remembered about David Foster Wallace. “He said that he believed he was eighty-five percent sincere and fifteen percent full of shit.” Wallace got the words right, but the math wrong. Somehow he concluded that that was a shameful ratio, that someone who’s fifteen percent full of shit should shut up. Shut down. Shut himself down.
In truth, that’s a beautiful ratio. For most of us, we’re lucky if it’s the other way around–if we can find fifteen percent in us that’s less than petty, that’s worth the slightest attention from the world. He got the words right, but the math wrong.
David Foster Wallace died of an illness called acute clinical depression, last September down in Southern California. This is a bitch of a disease, because before it kills you, it kills your hope. Other illness have those little lights of hope, like the signs illuminating the exits in this theater. You’re guided by the odds–even slim ones–of a treatment, a cure, a remission.
Depression extinguishes those lights. It extinguishes the memory of those lights, the idea of those lights. Then it extinguishes you.This is from a character in Infinite Jest, speaking of depression and wanting an end:
And then but no matter what I do it gets worse and worse, it’s there more and more, this filter drops down and the feeling makes the fear of the feeling way worse, and after a couple of weeks it’s there all the time, the feeling, and I’m totally inside it, I’m in it and everything has to pass through it to get in, and I don’t want to smoke any Bob, and I don’t want to work, or go out, or read, or watch TV, or go out, or stay in, or either do anything or not do anything, I don’t want anything except for the feeling to go away. But it doesn’t. Part of the feeling is being like willing to do anything to make it go away. Understand that. Anything. Do you understand? It’s not wanting to hurt myself it’s wanting to not hurt.
That is–a scar of a paragraph. And in the light of how we must read it now, it is something more than fiction. It is the closest David Foster Wallace came to saying goodbye.
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02.18.09 § 0