david foster wallace, 1962-2008

Sydney

I am angry at David Foster Wallace.  It's a delicate, specialized anger that I have not felt toward anyone since Spalding Gray jumped off the Staten Island Ferry in 2004 leaving a wife and two sons and all the spellbound audiences in small arty theatres who'd swum to Cambodia with him and his ratty spiral-bound notebook.  Because Wallace's voice was like Gray's, a chattering fount that the author had to ride like a bronco and channel like a flood and that still demanded new metaphors faster than even he could think. 

I'm angry because both Wallace and Gray had seemed finally to say yes, I'm onto this, I'm riding this, I can be a professor at a liberal arts college or a New York performance artist and have a wife and write and publish and take out the trash as though it's not true, as Wallace wrote once, paraphrased here because the Harper's website offers it free only in tiny print and it would break the flow to pay them for it just now, that for the depressed person the impossibility of expressing the pain is the core of its essential horror.  I am briefly concerned for the safety of Dave Eggers, whom I've never met, but who seems the third point of this abundant, implosive trinity.

I am angry because I know about September at Pomona College in Claremont, California, my own alma mater where Wallace has taught since 2002.  I know about trying to start a new academic year in the blanketing heat of late summer, the air not as white as it was in my day but still heavy as death and vaguely smelling of it.  I know how Claremont's craggy, encircling live-oaks and comforting guidelines of palms all speak unconvincingly of eternity and virtue, as though this were a theme park designed with the best of intentions by all our collective grandparents.   I know how brilliant people arrive there as professors fresh from slaying dragons and discovering new particles and crafting peace in blasted homelands and suddenly wonder why, in their prime or just a smidgeon past it, no number of eager undergraduates, their ears wide, their eyes wet and flashing, can erase the sensation that this town and its colleges are some kind of vast retirement home.  That in this heavy air, contrary to all the exciting previews of the coming year, Nothing Can Possibly Ever Happen Again.

I am angry because I see how a writer of Wallace's genius could walk those over-wide streets beneath those muffling oaks, as alone as I was no matter how accompanied, and lose the thread that had once raveled into Infinite Jest, the 1996 novel of 1079 pages and 388 footnotes that proved you could write about the blackest hell-worlds of ambition and addiction and abuse with a flattening, unflattering fluorescence that was erudite and yet playful and yet utterly honest and yet so hilarious as to imperil the breath, and that all I needed to do in response was to write a little review.  And then finally, digging, I find that opening sentence I wanted to quote from the story in Harper's, "The Depressed Person."  I quoted it long ago in my review of Wallace's Brief Interviews with Hideous Men.  It goes like this (and the story goes on, with care but no mercy, in the same clinical tone.)

The depressed person was in terrible and unceasing emotional pain, and the impossibility of sharing or articulating this pain was itself a component of the pain and a contributing factor to its essential horror.

I'm angry that to say such a see stark truth is not to see, and live, beyond it.  I'm angry that finally, words fail.

Comments

[Mike]

Thanks. That was the eulogy i needed.

[Teresa Gilman]

What a sadness that he's gone. My heart hurts today.

Your eulogy at lest touches this.

FA

[Miss Bliss]

I adore you. Who else but you would have connected Spalding Gray to David Foster Wallace. I do understand why you would throw Dave Eggers in there but 826 Valencia is why I do not worry for him.

Suicide makes me angry, so deeply angry that it can bring me to tears...and you know that doesn't happen much. Sometimes I think our greatest fear and our deepest pain is that no one truly sees us.

Well done.

[Jacob Russell]

What are we assuming when we find that we are angry, and our anger is directed at another person? What are we not saying? About how much power we have over our lives? About how little power we may find we have when overtaken by waves of manic energy or when our legs and arms and heart, the very power to imagine ourselves anywhere else or in any other condition--are shackled as in iron?

A soul who is depressed does not spend the day sitting on the edge of his bed, unable to move, because he is sad, because he is in pain; he does not move because to rise and go down the stairs and open the door and walk out on the street involves first an act of imagination. One sees oneself in this future, entertains it as a possibility. In depression a person is stripped of the ability to believe it is possible to act, and every action is an act of force, moving against a great weight, weighted under--until the simple acts of sustaining life are beyond all human strengh.

[Jarrett]

Yes, Jacob, I know very exactly what you mean. I say only that I would like to believe that for someone as imaginative as Wallace, some shred of that imagination, or its products, could have sustained him through one of those moments, and that failing that, he could have stayed his hand for the sake of people close to him.

Not that I believe this, but I would like to.

[Jacob Russell]

"could have" are the operative words here.

Exactly what depression, particularly the cycling phases of bipolar disorder--strip away. One does not choose that sort of end, one is seized by it.

[Jacob Russell]

Hard to know where to insert this into this... certainly to me... painful subject...

but I'm glad you left a comment on my blog--which led me to discovering yours.

I have a nice down your side of the planet.NZ... a painter.

Anyway--thank your for your comments

[dale]

There's always, I find, a little sleight-of-hand involved in writing about depression. Because you can't really write from it. You write from the edges of it, the nightmare memory of it or the impending dread of it, and you pretend you're writing from it, but you're not, really, because no words, no light, no nothing comes out of that center. And then you realize that you've written another thing that's not quite true, though it may be good, may even be useful. I always feel a little bad about the stuff I've written about depression.

[Jarrett]

Dale. Yes, thank you, that's it exactly, and I feel that about this.

The closest Wallace came to actually writing about depression was his story "The Depressed Person," which in its clinical tone expresses a refusal to step into the black hole of the depressed person's point of view, and instead undertakes an obsessive, fascinated mapping of all its describable edges.

[Teresa Gilman]

When he lived in my neighborhood in the early 90s we didn't know what a good writer he was; he just turned up at parties and stuff. It was only after he left that his writing took off. Now, it feels like I will be reading all of his stuff anew, from a different person. Not the one I thought he was.

Does this make sense?

T.

[Jarrett]

Yes, totally. I thought he was stronger. But that's the fascination: why do I believe that talent and drive, which he clearly had, imply strength in the face of darkness?