piece on David Foster Wallace<\/a> is the best thing I\u2019ve come across on Wallace. He starts with the arresting claim that in time \u201cit will be recognized that Wallace had less in common with Eggers and Franzen than he did with Dostoevsky and Joyce.\u201d His fiction is a brief for subjectivity, consciousness, the possibility of living a human life even in the confusions of contemporary culture. If he seems to perpetuate those confusions with his rambling postmodern prose, his deployment of irony, his knowingness about cultural brands, it\u2019s because he knew he had to prove his bona fides, to show that he knew how tough it is to be human. He had to show off like a sophisticate so he could slip in his charmingly, poignantly unsophisticated message.<\/p>\nThis characteristic passage, which Baskin quotes at length, displays both Wallace\u2019s willingness to play the game so as to subvert it from within:<\/p>\n
\u201cThe depressed person\u2019s therapist, whose school of therapy rejected the transference relation as a therapeutic resource and thus deliberately eschewed confrontation and \u2018should\u2019-statements and all normative, judging, \u2018authority\u2019-based theory in favor of a more value-neutral bioexperiential model and the creative use of analogy and narrative (including, but not necessarily mandating, the use of hand puppets, polystyrene props and toys, role-playing . . . and in appropriate cases, whole meticulously scripted and storyboarded Childhood Reconstructions), had deployed the following medications in an attempt to help the depressed person find some relief from her acute affective discomfort and progress in her (i.e., the depressed person\u2019s) journey toward enjoying some semblance of a normal adult life: Paxil, Zoloft, Prozac, Tofranil, Welbutrin, Elavil, Metrazol in combination with unilateral ECT . . . \u00a0None had delivered any significant relief from the pain and feelings of emotional isolation that rendered the depressed person\u2019s every waking hour an indescribable hell on earth.\u201d<\/p>\n
He sure knows his therapists and therapies, but the whole thrust of the passage is to satirize \u201cthe morally noncommittal fiction writers Wallace would align himself against. Her experiments are stand-ins for the alienating and dysfunctional strategies Wallace attributed to mid-twentieth-century avant-garde theory and art. The story is ultimately about the failure of such strategies to satisfy the needs of a depressed person.\u201d Satirizing the available therapies, Wallace simultaneously presented his work as therapy of a Wittgensteinian type, an attempt to shatter the \u201cpicture\u201d that dominates his readers.<\/p>\n
Irony is the central illness of contemporary culture, Wallace concluded. And the solution, the radical<\/em> solution, was to risk earnestness and banality: \u201cIn contrast to \u2018the old postmodern insurgents [who] risked the gasp and squeal: shock, disgust, outrage, censorship . . . \u00a0the next real literary \u2018rebels\u2019. . . might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the \u2018Oh how banal.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\nInfinite Jest<\/em> is a gigantic encomium to banality. One protagonist, Hal Incandenza, \u201cis a member of a literary species traceable from Shakespeare\u2019s melancholy Dane down through Ivan Karamazov and Stephen Daedalus.\u201d A member of a wealthy, successful though tragic family, Hal is on the cusp of a promising future of tennis and academic achievement.\u00a0But he is lost, alienated, virtually incapable of communication. He loses himself in a haze of marijuana smoke under the bleachers of his father\u2019s tennis school. For Wallace, irony is a form of escape and flight, drugs a shortcut to the same condition.<\/p>\nThe other protagonist is washed-up Don Gately, a football star whose own additions have reduced him to working as an orderly at a halfway house. Through Gately, Alcoholics Anonymous emerges as the \u201cirony-free zone\u201d that promises salvation: \u201cThe truly radical thing about the book is Wallace\u2019s un-ironic assertion that Alcoholics Anonymous offers a series of wisdoms about life. . . .\u00a0An appropriately skeptical reader wonders when and how the author will puncture the balloon of respect he inflates around AA, but Wallace finally means to suggest that AA\u2019s \u2018corny slogans\u2019 are deeper than the condescending witticisms with which we might dismiss them.\u201d<\/p>\n
Wallace wasn\u2019t the first to bring attention to the successes of AA, but he \u201cwas the first to propose it as a solution to the problem of postmodern thinking. This problem had the structure of addiction, he suggested. . . .\u00a0From the standpoint of AA, the addict seeks refuge in his substance from the pain of contemporary life. But his worst addiction is not to his substance, but to a highly reflexive and indulgent way of thinking. Ironically, this unites Wallace\u2019s addicts both with the metafictionist and the metafictionist\u2019s theoretical partner, the post-structuralist critic.\u201d<\/p>\n
In sum, \u201cWallace\u2019s therapeutic art always treated pain as a symptom of distress, confusion and isolation. Within the novel, the variously damaged characters turn to the common cultural palliatives: drugs, sports, entertainment, therapy\u2014as well as what are familiar resources for Wallace\u2019s readers: cynicism, theory, avant-garde art. Through this maze of failures some are led to AA, while others go quietly insane or kill themselves with ghastly creativity. . . .\u00a0Irony, satire and ridicule, masked as coping mechanisms, become the ongoing symptoms and restatements of our condition. Wallace draws a line from the Frankfurt School to the metafictionists to The Simpsons<\/em> to The Daily Show<\/em>. He drives us to acknowledge the AA maxim that not just our worst, but also our \u2018Best Thinking\u2019 got us here, where we are free to say anything but what we mean.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Jon Baskin\u2019s piece on David Foster Wallace is the best thing I\u2019ve come across on Wallace. He starts with the arresting claim that in time \u201cit will be recognized that Wallace had less in common with Eggers and Franzen than he did with Dostoevsky and Joyce.\u201d His fiction is a brief for subjectivity, consciousness, the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3021,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1531],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19002","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-david-foster-wallace"],"yoast_head":"\n
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