why/dfw

But where David Foster Wallace became singular, in my opinion, where David Foster Wallace transcended all the postmodern games and became flat out heroic--that was the point where he took these structures and took all those superb toys from his playground and applied them to nothing less than the singular struggle to manage the doubts and voices and fears and weaknesses inside your head and ... just ... fucking ... live.

It is unbearably difficult to read writing that makes you more connected to yourself and the universe and all the wonders and disappointments and tiny desires for decency that come with being alive, and also to know that the person who wrote those words hung himself. The easy and natural guess is that Wallace was able to portray the loneliness and sadness and struggle so well because he was so deeply enmeshed in this struggle, every single day of his life. Enmeshed to the point where maybe he related to and saw the struggle more clearly as a mechanism of coping with his depression, the point where maybe his writing about these things was his only release from what was going on inside his head. Where maybe even the struggle and joy of expressing all this so clearly was also its own pressure and caused its own anxiety and depression and problems.

The hard, cold fact is, for a period of almost twenty years David Foster Wallace was able to focus all of his considerable writing gifts and powers of observation on the struggle of fighting with yourself to stay alert and alive. And he was able, with more clarity and acuity and brainpower and charm and humor and insight than anybody else of our time, to express what it was to be completely and utterly locked in this fight.

The accidental progenitor of the blogorrheic style is David Foster Wallace. What distinguishes Wallace’s writing from the prose it begot is a fusion of the scrupulous and the garrulous; all of our colloquialisms, typically diffusing a mist of vagueness over the world, are pressed into the service of exactness. To a generation of writers, the DFW style was the sound of telling the truth, as—in an opposite way—the flat declaratives and simplified vocabulary of Hemingway were for a different generation. But an individual style, terse or wordy, can breed a generalized mannerism, and the path once cleared to saying things truly and well is now an obstacle course. In the case of the blogorrheic style, institutional and technological pressures coincided with Wallace’s example. Bloggers (which more and more is just to say writers) had little or no editing to deal with, and if they blogged for money they needed to produce, produce. The combination discouraged the stylistic virtues of concision, selectivity, and impersonality.

There’s a passage in The Ask where Milo likens himself to a figure in Hopper’s Nighthawks, and he mentions how, as a painter, he’d always described it in terms of “the stark play of shadow and light.” This is a perfectly appropriate way of looking at Hopper’s work, but then Milo says, “to be the fucker on the stool is another kind of stark entirely.” It’s a funny line, a throwaway almost, but it strikes me as an encapsulation of the burden of writers working today. Yeah, we’re concerned with form, with language, with allusiveness and scaffolding—the legacy of modernist and postmodernist writing—but a lot of us also want, to a degree maybe not countenanced by more playful antecedents, to get at the starkness of being “the fucker on the stool.” That seems like the project David Foster Wallace was working on for his entire career: getting at that, at how the methods of getting at it sometimes work at cross-purposes to the goal.

At the same time that Hal's speech indicates his philosophical intelligence, it suggests the failure of philosophy to help him, therapeutically speaking. If it represents a graduate student's defense of his humanity, it also signals the poverty of the version of humanity being defended. If we as readers initially fail to see this poverty, I would propose it is because we share it.