Spectacle of Deconstruction
A real, genuine, fully unqualified, down-the-rabbit-hole-like retrospective of David Foster Wallace.
(expected read time: about 2 hours)
( courtesy of wikimedia )
February 21, 2022 would have been David's 60th birthday. Widely hailed as a genius and one of the literary forerunners of both post-postmodernism and meta-modernism, David captured the spirit of the early digital age in a memorable and visceral way, and his writing, which attempts to understand the struggles of adapting to an increasingly digital and abstracted world, is still hailed as prophetic by many readers decades afterwards. His similarly noteworthy commentary on the Reagan era, and his nostalgia for the lost innocence of his Midwestern youth, predicted the resurgence of similar themes in the Trump era, with its combo of political spectacle savagely blended with an affected 'good old days' congeniality vividly capturing the flavor of American politics. His death in September 2008 left a void in the literary canon where he once stood, and as the proceeding decades marched onward, we were left wondering at so many crucial moments – what would David have said about this?
Throughout his work he tackled issues familiar to many in the modern world: suicide, depression, drug abuse, getting sober, television, alienation, family strife, dysfunctional relationships, the differences between “self” and “other”, and investigated a way out of the trap of self-centered modern living. He made allusions to the great literature of the past, pushed himself to the limits of his capacity to think, and sought after a way of living his life which would reconcile himself to the world, especially through literature and its ability to communicate the most important parts of the mortal condition. Throughout his career, he studied and corresponded with many of the personae giganteios of the previous era of writers – McCarthy, Roth, DeLillo, Pynchon, (all of whom outlived him), and others. The positive aspects of his work, and the now-fact of his absence, completed the process of turning David into a culturally hallowed hollow-object – as has happened to many controversial figures of the past – but in life the man as he existed was as rich with contradiction as anyone.
Suicide disorients those who survive its proximity, in countless tiny ways it upends our previous perceptions of the world. It turns birthdays into funerary remembrance, intimate lovers into inert bodies, words into bitter finalities, household objects into grim tableau. In his magnum opus Infinite Jest, Wallace would describe the act as “destroying the map” – a transfiguration of the known psychic landscape into surreal undiscovered territories. For fans and students of his work and the Western canon writ large, David's suicide transformed our memories of a painfully shy bookworm with a heart of gold and a bandana, into a terra incognita whose landscape was dotted with shipwrecked relationships, the earth deeply scarred and wounded, and in the center the ruins of the elaborate constructed fictional selves which were all that remained of a once real person. Throughout his life and letters, David mentioned a metaphorical 'statue' that was constructed of him as a result of the fame and marketing hype around his early books. He fretted over the possible damage that could come to the statue, and what the differences between the statue and his real self really were. The image of a statue as a metaphor for a manufactured self shows up throughout his fiction as well, in Infinite Jest and Good Old Neon (both also notable for their suicide of a male protagonist). It's a clear symbol of the identity difficulties that accompany celebrity, when the perceived qualities of a person come to stand for the person themselves.
David was certainly not the only author or celebrity to feel this tension between selves: Britney Spears shaving her head, or Justin Bieber street racing sports cars while smoking joints come to mind as events of the primacy of the real self over the celebrity image. Another famous literary suicide-case, Hunter S. Thompson, whose celebrated lit-bro New Journalism work was more drug-soaked and less logically rigorous than Wallace's, said throughout his career that he was never really sure if people wanted to meet “Hunter” or “Dr. Gonzo” (his literary persona). David mentions difficulties with his reconciling himself to his persona, or understanding himself when factored through the lens of other people's perceptions of his fame or social importance, often preferring friendships with 'normal people' he met through recovery groups. His widow, the visual artist and poet Karen Green, said in one of her few public interviews, with Tim Adams of The Guardian, that being seen as a “celebrity writer dude” would have made him wince.
Regardless, thirteen years on from his suicide, it's hard to deny that his death transmuted a once obscure artist into a zeitgeist encapsulating man of his times. David's stylistic quirks now seem to be a synecdoche of 90s grunge-Americana. There is absolutely undeniable clairvoyance in the hyper-stylized representation of a near-future corporate dystopia that formed the setting for Infinite Jest. Many mournful recollections of his work mention his Kenyon College commencement address (later published as This is Water) where he had boiled down decades of morally reassuring 'Recovery Logic' from his time spent in and around Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. You can hear echoes of his voice in authors who have clearly read and were (consciously or unconsciously) replicating the style David employed in his famous essays about a Porn Convention, Lobster Festival, State Fair, Cruise Ship, 9/11 and the US Open. In many ways he became a prototypical “lit-bro”, and the guiding star of lost male artists in the new millennium, and IJ as well as his later books of short fiction like Brief Interviews with Hideous Men and Oblivion, became the canonical texts of depression and the dark-side of male psychology. If actually reading Wallace becomes tedious, you need simply click on your television set to find Jason Segel playing him in The End of The Tour, Charlie Kauffman fictionalizing him in Being John Malkovich, or catch any number of references to Wallace in television sit-coms, the most obvious among them being in Parks and Recreation, whose co-creator Michael Schur met Wallace at Harvard in the 90s. Needless to say, David would have a lot of wincing to do.
Allow me a quick aside. In Julius Caesar's Commentaries on the Gallic Wars he noted that the Northern European 'Gauls' would sometimes sentence criminals or thralls to death by burning, in a macabre human sacrifice that involved setting fire to a large wooden statue with the victim inside. Modern historians doubt this account, noting Caesar's tendency to play up his commentaries to generate excitement (much like Wallace's own non-fiction) however the mythopoeic effect of the Wicker Man persisted, and its influence can still be seen throughout the modern era – from the Inquisition or the burning of young women during the Salem 'Witch Trials', holidays like 'Bonfire Day' and 'St John's Eve', the psychedelia of Burning Man, and new-age 'fire cleansing' rituals. The Wicker Man ceremony, if it existed as Caesar recorded, would have served many purposes for an ancient tribal society, a festive event which cleanses an unpleasant element of the community, as well as being represented symbolically as a 'tribute to the Gods', with the large wicker statue that functioned as the wick for the cleansing fire – a symbol of the man and the troublesome qualities of him which necessitated the purging.
In the years following his death the complex edifice of DFW's statue has been added to and restructured as more wood comes to the pyre: from the elegiac posthumous remembrances of 'Saint David', to the more complex representations of David depicted in DT Max's biography of Wallace Every Love Story is a Ghost Story, or Jonathan Franzen's essay Farther Away, memoirs that feature (often controversial) moments shared with him like Lit by Mary Karr and In the Land of Men by Adrienne Miller, to the deluge of stories of inappropriate contact and relationships with his students that slowly made their way into the public eye in the ten years since his death. As we approach the potential ascension of David's literary output into the canon of western literature, a debate has to be held – what shall we do with this statue of a man whose complex and problematic realities represent real and symbolic damage done to a community? Is this image to be preserved or to be burned?
The Timing Of It All
The following observation is fairly crass, but unfortunately unavoidable: When David died in 2008, he did not have much to sell, book-wise. His most recent fiction releases had been in 1999 and 2004 (neither had sold particularly well, first year hardcover sales of 18k and 14k was a drop in the bucket compared to the half-a-million in sales for IJ), and his most well-known book Infinite Jest was already a common staple on the bookshelves of the demographics most likely to read it. Plans were quickly unfolded to get some of his back-catalogue and out-of-print books, like Broom of the System and Girl With Curious Hair re-released, while a copy of his undergrad philosophy thesis released in 2010 to negligible acclaim, and a new collection of essays Both Flesh and Not was authorized but wouldn't appear in print until 2012. His unfinished novel The Pale King had been posthumously compiled and edited by Michael Pietsch, his novel editor at Little, Brown and released in 2011, opening up renewed interest in his work and its possible literary legacy. The combination of the positive reception of TPK and BF&N, the release of his biography, and the renewed interest in retrospectives for David's life began the hype that would power the 'Wallace Studies' cottage industry, whose heyday of 2012-2018 saw merch, memes, college courses, literary festivals, and op-eds with David as their sole or primary focus eek their way out of the extremely niche corners of literary fiction and towards mainstream attention.
As it tends to do, the cultural attention began to draw out the darker parts of David's history as well --decades of allegations of abuse and misconduct began to surface after his death, and both first and second-hand accounts of David's behavior surfaced in print. Jonathan Franzen, who had been a lifelong correspondent to Wallace, published the essay Farther Away in the New Yorker in 2011, and in it, he describes a trip to Chile where he scattered some of David's cremation ashes, and discusses his feelings around David's death and the representations of 'Saint Dave' that had been made of him in the media, and noted that “the people who knew David least well are most likely to speak of him in saintly terms.” Franzen republished the piece as the titular item of a book of essays the next year, only a few months before the release of DT Max's Every Love Story is a Ghost Story appeared in August 2012. Max's research found many accounts of sexual and social misconduct by David, and brought the relationship between Wallace and Karr into more public view. Mary Karr's Lit had been published in 2009, in which she memorialized her time spent in Boston AA meetings and writing her smash-hit The Liars Club, and while not a focus of the novel, in it she discussed the time in her life when she was enmeshed with Wallace, who was also spending much of his time in recovery meetings – “We were both just shocking wrecks,” she would later recall. Lit, and by extension Karr, had avoided associations with Wallace by simply not mentioning it very much, and many of the book's early reviews didn't mention it much either. Over the next decade, this would change so much that Karr now requests people stop asking her about Wallace in interviews, and the start of the deluge was likely the 2012 New Yorker Festival.
With “Sauron's Great Red Eye” (David's term for mainstream media attention and fame) again affixed on David's legacy, and with so many different DFW-relevant books now for sale, the 2012 New Yorker Festival announced that one of its panels would be “Rereading David Foster Wallace” – Moderated by DT Max(who was also a staff writer at the New Yorker), with panelists Mary Karr (aforementioned memoirist and poet), Mark Costello (a lawyer, writer, and David's college roommate from Amherst), Dana Spiotta (a novelist and fan who had fictionalized Wallace), and Deborah Treisman (long-time fiction editor at the New Yorker, who edited some pieces of Infinite Jest in the 90s when she worked at Grand Street). This hour-long panel was a seminal moment in the public understanding of David's life, with many people getting their first glimpses at the complex and not-entirely-positive web of relationships that he created around himself, and the highly varying degrees to which people understood him as a person. Treisman, whose relationship with David was a professional and mostly epistolatory one, described her view: “his bandana, and the long hair, slightly nervous, and glasses, failure to make eye contact, and social avoidance. All the things that became his classic public persona later”. Spiotta, whose relationship was one of a fan of Wallace's, described a memory of him as a bandana across an SRO reading on the Infinite Jest tour, and the literary influences that helped shape her own work. Karr and Costello's recollections however, cannot help but be revealing of character and memory on a cellular level: Costello oscillates between glowing with nostalgia when talking about youthful memories of David and straining in the whispers of unhealed grief when discussing David's death and issues with depression, while Karr, like the black-sheep at the family reunion, gets more anxious as she resists ruining a nice occasion with too much revealed truth.
“What he didn't tell me was that he was coming off a suicide attempt...” Costello said about their decision to share an apartment years after their friendship developed at Amherst College, “he sorta compartmentalized what he told you, it was like dealing with Richard Nixon in some ways.” Later, he would choke up when describing the effect of reading Wallace posthumously, “the book that's hardest for me to even touch, in light of his suicide, is Girl With Curious Hair,” which had been the book of short stories that David published during their time together in Boston.
Karr discusses her admiration for Forever Overhead, a story in GWCH, “his other writing to me feels very decorative.. and this (Forever Overhead) to me seemed very felt, and I think it was actually closest to who David really was in his heart, because it was so much a story about fear of performance... which, am I wrong Mark? Like 95% of his life was about fear of performance.” Karr's banter with Costello shows the easy familiarity among old friends that they still shared years later, but an uneasy tension builds throughout the discussion as the more uncomfortable aspects of her relationship with David came to the forefront.
“It is strange isn't it, that the two books were written 100 feet apart, at the same time on some block in Syracuse,” Costello remarks about Wallace's Infinite Jest and Karr's The Liar's Club. The comment, glossing over the most tumultuous parts of Karr's relationship with Wallace, including the time he spent stalking her while she was still married to her ex-husband, and the fact that she moved to Syracuse initially in part to save her marriage and get away from David, clearly set her on edge. You can see the tension in her jaw, almost as if she's literally biting her tongue to keep from saying any more about her own feelings on the subject.
A few minutes later, Spiotta makes reference to some of the uncomfortable realities of David's relationships when talking about women in his fiction: “I don't have a problem with him and women as a reader, honestly I don't... after reading your biography though... (nodding past Karr towards DT Max) that's different.” Shortly after, Karr becomes more animated, when discussing the inconsiderate and nearly resentful treatment of Elizabeth Wurtzel, writer of Prozac Nation, which Wallace satirized in his short story The Depressed Person after his pursuit of a sexual relationship with Wurtzel failed to achieve his goals. Costello's discomfort manifests during this conversation, nearly leaning sideways off his chair away from Karr and Max. Even without directly mentioning David's history of abuse towards his romantic partners, the overall psychic effect of the 2012 New Yorker Festival panel for a viewer unfamiliar with the seamier aspects of David's personal life would have been the all-too-familiar disappointment of learning for the first time about the predilections of any cherished cultural figure – a feeling only deepened if one then read's more of the reported detail in Max's biography. Many of his readers were likely only partially aware of Wallace's history of misbehavior, mental breakdowns and rehab stints, owing to his years of perfecting his Nixonian secrecy and guarding of details of his private life.
In an eerily apt foreshadowing of the development of David's legacy over the next few years, Costello had opened the program with an anecdote about meeting David: while at a party as a freshman, he was telling a story about being so nervous that he had vomited on the way to his college interviews, and David, who was walking past, replied nervously, “Me too.” Of course this phrase had not yet taken on the widespread context that it would by 2017 (although the term was coined in 2006 by Tarana Burke), it's hard not to note the irony. David, along with Charles Bukowski, would soon become the literary world's pre-MeToo practice rounds for the sort of internet-based cultural vitriol that would soon come for powerful perpetrators of abuse. Many of the conversations around whether it was right to besmirch the legacy of a (dead, retired, or still active) celebrity, what sort of punishment is due for high-profile professionals with less than admirable personal lives, and whether the psychic effect of a generation of male readers and viewers consuming the 'Thoughts of Hideous Men' outweighed the cultural benefit of their work, would be echoed throughout the next years as scandals rocked the Hollywood and New York establishments – Harvey Weinstein, Woody Allen, Roman Polanski, Bill Cosby, Matt Lauer, Charlie Rose (who interviewed Wallace twice), Junot Diaz, Derek Walcott, Sherman Alexie, and more. Even Stockholm was not immune to the wave of backlash, with the 2018 Nobel Prize for Literature grinding to a halt over sexual abuse allegations towards Jean-Claude Arnault, the husband of one of the members of the selection committee.
In addition to the abuse and sexual advances towards his students detailed by DT Max, and Mary Karr's later frank discussions about her time with Wallace (“That's about 2% of the shit that happened,” she would say about Max's biography of Wallace), many first-hand accounts began to rise into public view, especially among the student population of the University of Illinois (David taught there in the 90s) where the 'Cult of Saint David' was strongest, in no small part thanks to the preservation efforts of 'the statue' that were undertaken by Charles and Victoria Harris, notable professors who had recruited Wallace to Illinois (Wallace also later dated and cohabited with their daughter Kymberly) and had been a major source of anecdotes in DT Max's biography. Victoria also occasionally oversaw and attended the university's DFW Conferences which ran from 2014-2019, but by 2018 there were significant signs of unpopularity with the student body. According to journalist Daniel Kolitz in The Outline, fliers for the 2018 conference hung at the school were defaced with “NAH I DONT LIKE PREDATORS”.
Journalists wrote pieces about the continued feasibility of 'Wallace Studies' as an academic subject in light of the spate of allegations against the man himself. Yale Literature Professor Amy Hungerford wrote about her refusal to assign his material to students: “The machine of his celebrity masks the limited benefits of spending the time required to read his work. Our time is better spent elsewhere. I make this assessment given the evidence I have so far accumulated — I have read and taught some of his stories and nonfiction, have read some critical essays on Wallace’s work, and have read D.T. Max’s biography of Wallace — and without feeling professionally obligated to spend a month reading Infinite Jest in order to be absolutely sure I’m right.” Elsewhere she writes that his framing of his work as 'erotic' and 'a seduction of the reader', combined with his questionable personal behavior, makes it inappropriate to force on readers. His work is often extremely and pervasively personal and revealing, and while many of his understandings have become more prophetic, still others aged poorly and became problematic – female stereotypes, casual '90s bro' homophobia and insisting that his African American students use “Standard White English” come to mind. Regardless, Wallace's work continues to have an effect on the popular conceptions of the development of literature, with his descriptions of media-saturated life and the solipsism of modern living becoming ever more accurate with time and the advent of digital communication, on-demand streaming and social media, while Wallace inspired genre tags like “hyper-realist” “post-ironic” “new sincerity” and “post-postmodern” fiction became subsequent generations of bestsellers.
Even while he was alive, you can see the prescience of this dilemma in poignant self-referential expression of stories like The Suffering Channel, in which a sculptor (of sorts) who defecates art begins to experience an artist's blockage while attempting to mold a classic on live television, with the personal shame that is permanently linked to art's creation held tightly deep in the innards of a vulnerable person now on full view for public consumption, with a nation of viewers and commentators eagerly awaiting the next offering, for purposes of both appreciation and deprecation – “It's shit,” says the critic.
What Makes A Man?
[N.B. – The following section is mostly biographical, and inevitably draws heavily on the research done by DT Max. I will not attempt to thoroughly or exhaustively describe David's life, but rather establish some basic time-lines and facts that will be necessary for making the final points I intend to cover in this essay. Anyone seeking a more complete accounting of events in David's life should read Max's biography, I consider it a necessary part of any Wallace Completionist's reading list.]
Here's an extremely condensed timeline: Born in Ithaca, NY on February 22, 1962 to James and Sally (nee. Foster) Wallace, both academics – James in philosophy, Sally in grammar and literature. The family relocated to Champaign-Urbana, Illinois shortly afterwards when James took a job at the University of Illinois. High-school saw the beginnings of the identifiable DFW – pot smoking intellectualism, tennis, and social anxiety. After high-school, he attended Amherst College in Boston, and then graduate school at the University of Arizona, Tuscon. He took a short residency at Yaddo in 1987, an artist's colony in Saratoga Springs, NY. The next two years saw Wallace entering into an identity crisis, revisiting places he had lived in frantic cycles of attempting to recapture the effective writing routines he had established in college – taking up short-lived teaching positions at Amherst and Tuscon, revisiting Yaddo, and ultimately moving in with Mark Costello who was now an Assistant DA in Boston. He resolved to gain his PhD in philosophy from Harvard, and in 1989 was enrolled, quickly flamed out and entered rehab after a self-reported bout of suicidal ideation prompted a health-check that revealed the extent of his alcoholism and drug dependency. While in recovery he met Mary Karr, and began work on Infinite Jest in earnest, eventually taking yet another short-lived teaching position at Emerson with Karr's recommendation. Karr moved with her husband to Syracuse, but Wallace followed the next year after their marriage fell apart. Their relationship, a source of brooding obsession for Wallace since they'd met, ended contentiously and Wallace left suddenly when he received an offer to teach at the Illinois State University. From 1993-2003, a relatively stable and productive era for Wallace coalesced, seeing the birth of much of his magazine work, two major fiction releases as well as the conceptual beginnings of his final two books. The main thing that changed through the Illinois years was the constant relationship-hopping in Wallace's personal life – meeting someone (all too frequently being vulnerable young mothers or students from Illinois State), rushing to bed with them, sometimes even moving them in and settling into an unfulfilled relationship pattern which often ended abruptly. 2003 would see the biggest disruption to the patterns of his 30s, taking a position at Claremont University in Pomona, CA., and the next year marrying painter and poet Karen Green. Four years later, he died by suicide on September 12, 2008.
Many readers will know most of the above-listed facts and timetables, they've formed the bones of most of the Wallace retrospective op-eds that have popped up in the last decade. Even more dedicated readers will be familiar with how these eras correspond to dominant literary influences for David, and the evolution and inter-linkage of themes throughout his life. His earliest published work, a dramatization of his struggles with depression and prescribed medication, Planet Trillaphon As It Stands In Relation To The Bad Thing, as well as his work on the Amherst humor magazine Sabrina, represent the young David with its earnestness and parodist leanings, and often one can hear distant echoes of Vonnegut and pulp paperbacks in its prose. Next, there was the Wittgenstein and Pynchon obsessed sophmoricism of Broom of the System, whose principle construction began as his Amherst senior thesis, and completed while attending UofA-Tuscon, while beginning the postmodern shorts collected in Girl with Curious Hair which draw on a wider range of influences, both literary and academic – from William Gass, Don Delillo, John Barth, Donald Barthelme, Roland Barthes, Robert Coover, as well as Hegel, Derrida, de Man, et al. Having thoroughly ingested both the academic and literary forerunners and influential figures in postmodernism, he then set out to create a sprawling metafictional inversion of postmodernism and metafiction in his mammoth novella Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way, which would be published as the final story in GWCH; in it he called for a new type of fiction, freed from the ironic distancing constraints of postmodernism, and more directly engaged with the emotional reactions of the reader. A close reader may note that this desired change was as much personal as aesthetic: after years of the distancing effects of alcohol and drug use, David was yearning for an emotional breakthrough and intimacy with his own thoughts and feelings. Westward is completed in a fury during the 1987 stay at Yaddo, and the years between the completion of the draft of the stories and their publication in 1989 were not particularly happy years for Wallace, and he was often frustrated with his failure to actually create the sort of fiction he called for in Westward (and in an essay written around this time called E Unibus Pluram), frequently relocating to areas he had lived in the preceding years to try to recapture the 'lightning in a bottle' feeling of writing fiction in college.
After the severe mental breakdown during his stint at Harvard, David reapplied himself more seriously to his fictional pursuits, beginning work on the titanic meta-fictional (and pseudo-biographical) Infinite Jest. Many fragments of the book had likely begun in early draft during his college years, especially the Hamlet-inspired postmodern yarns of the Incandenza family and the Quebecois independence movement: certain scenes with Orin Incandenza are set in Tuscon, an ex-girlfriend finds sections about Joelle Van Dyne under his bed in the same era, and Wallace references the Shakespearean title on his application to Yaddo in '87. The rest of the book begins to coalesce in the years after his stint in rehab and halfway-houses for recovering alcoholics, some details being lifted from the stories of people in his Alcoholics Anonymous groups, and others inspired by Wallace's reading (at the behest of Karr and Franzen) of older, darker, and more emotionally engaged fiction, before the carapace of cultural irony had hardened: writers like Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Chekov, Babel, Hemmingway, Nabokov, Virginia Woolf, Flannery O'Connor, Cormac McCarthy and Harry Crews. The intervening three years sees most of the work of Infinite Jest completed by the start of '93 and the beginnings of his career at Illinois State, with progress lurching forward and halting alongside the tumult of his on-again, off-again relationship with Karr (He notes in a journal: “The secret to '92 was that MK was most important, IJ was just a means to her end, as it were.”), and progress slowed after the move, with editing and last-minute changes stretching the pre-production process into a multi-year affair. He helped break up the dread of never-ending copy edits by engaging with some of the many offers for non-fiction work that started to come in from various literary magazines, including the notable early essay Ticket to the Fair, written for Harper's shortly after arriving in Illinois.
Infinite Jest would release in '96, and since has often been considered to be one of the earliest forerunners of post-postmodernism, (as he had predicted in Westward) with a wide array of characters seeking sincere meaning and transcendence in a near-future corporate dystopia. The success of Infinite Jest brought Wallace new opportunities, receiving a McArthur and a Lannon fellowship, and securing his connections in nonfiction publishing, the following few fertile years spawned dozens of magazine articles which became two collections (A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again and Consider the Lobster), as well as a collection of misogy-noir shorts entitled Brief Interviews with Hideous Men which was published in '99. Shortly before the move to Pomona he accepted an offer to write a pop-math treatise on Georg Cantor and the mathematical concept of infinity, which would eventually be published as Everything and More in 2003. As early as 1997, David had begun speculative research on what would eventually become his final fiction book, The Pale King, taking tax accounting classes and researching the IRS. He intended to push the “suffering to transcendence” paradigm that was emerging in Infinite Jest to new vistas of narrative potential by elevating the boredom of rote paperwork into the soul-releasing repetition of transcendental meditation and other Buddhist and yogic inspired disciplines that he had also taken an interest in throughout his time in recovery. His attempts at writing this new stylistic boredom-quam-spirituality were not entirely successful, and many short stories that were ultimately not selected for inclusion in TPK were collected separately as Oblivion, much in the same way that the stories in GWCH were in many ways contemporaneous to the writing of Infinite Jest. He found slightly more success in attempts at bringing the ideas to life in some of his final nonfiction essays like Federer as Religious Experience and his Kenyon College address on the importance of mindfulness This is Water.
What may not be so apparent to close readers of his fiction was the extent of interpersonal issues and mental illness that David tended to keep quiet. He was hospitalized three times throughout his college years, often returning home to Illinois to rest after having mental breakdowns during stressful periods at school. He had two more major episodes in the unstable years of desperately tracing his steps looking for his lost identity. His time constructing Infinite Jest brought him a new sense of self-confidence, but also permanently tied questions of his works to his shame over having been through rehab and mental health struggles. The rest of his career, an astute viewer will notice the shifting explanations and dissembling that David would employ to distance himself from being known either personally or through the phenomenological roots of his work: from coyly implying that he had only been to AA meetings as research, to saying that his issues with drugs and depression were no worse than anyone else in his generation, to claiming not to remember the influences of the book later in his life. Similar attempts at distancing attended the press tour for the release of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, with David variously admitting and denying the self-referential nature of the described male grotesquery, and in an interview with a German TV station in 2003, David states evasively “I didn't like that character very much... everybody asks me about this story and its like the one I don't want to talk about,” when speaking of The Depressed Person, the story written as an act of psychic revenge against Elizabeth Wurtzel. In addition to the issues with celebrity and interpersonal relationships, Wallace did not handle being stuck or blocked well creatively and with progress not moving forward on his ultimate vision for his next book, he came unglued much as he had after finishing the draft for Girl With Curious Hair but before finding traction to finish Infinite Jest. Wallace was known to make destructive choices when creatively marooned, including ending relationships, self-harm and moving cities with little notice. Both periods of major writer's block precipitated equally major mental breakdowns for Wallace, and in 2007, after stopping his psychiatric medication in the hopes to reboot his mental operating system, Wallace entered into a severe depression which didn't lift for months. He attempted suicide multiple times before ultimately succeeding in the act.
Costello's joking caricature of Wallace as a Nixonian compartmentalization master turns out to be poignantly accurate, both in the secretive nature of his suicide, and the attempts while still alive to avoid public scrutiny, shame and defamation: DT Max relates a story of Wallace where he accosts a young woman (who he was presumably sexually involved with) who turns up at a reading, saying “I told you not to come here.” It's not hard to see why so many people ended up with so many different highly distinct impressions of David after his death. It takes a tremendous amount of effort to remain relatively unknown in the face of literary and cultural attention – just ask Thomas Pynchon, if you can find him.
Fragments
David's profound ambivalence on the subject of self, his persistently shifting inner life and dissembling of his inner motivations made the pre-and-posthumous work on understanding his life much more difficult, but thanks in no small part to an immense amount of letters that he sent to companions, glimpses of his interior process were saved for later examination and contemplation. At the New Yorker Festival in 2012, DT Max would joke that David was “God's gift to US mail,” and Karr would remark that David wrote her letters constantly even when they were in the same house. This curious habit of extensive written correspondence might seem a temporal oddity, since Wallace's generation was one of the first to have near-ubiquitous access to phones (and later, email), the habit of letter writing seems to mark him as a holdover from the 19th century, but this quirk is less temporal or motivated by a Luddite suspicion of technology, and more an emotional signature from his childhood. Sally Foster-Wallace, David's mother, suffered from “nerves” (explanation of old-timey psychiatric jargon upcoming) and would frequently retreat into a solitary quiet room to calm down, during which interstices her children Amy and David were entreated to write any emotional confessions or personal requests into notes to be slipped under the door. Even as an adult, this motivation is abundantly clear as a source for the tremendous reams of paper fired off to friends and romantic partners whenever David had a troublesome emotion to express – it was, after all, much safer to contemplate ones feelings before sharing them.
This sense of the frailty of emotional expression that needed to be buttressed by time and contemplation, the extensive letter writing as a consequence of childhood experience is something that David shared with Franz Kafka, whose overbearing father had helped to foster a sense of frailty and psychic unwelcomeness in young Franz. Kafka and Wallace shared other similarities as well, from debilitating mental health issues and turbulent relationships, to a profound sense of the surreality and emotionally deleterious effects of modern living. Both writers became posthumously better understood, regardless of the paucity of self-expressive knowledge shared with contemporaries, through their letters and through interpretation of their bodies of fiction work. In fact, even the motivation to create fiction itself, for both writers, may have been tied into this deepest emotional need to communicate with the people closest to them. David described himself as trying to make fiction that was 'morally compassionate, compassionately moral' and could 'make the head throb heart-like', and was also clearly trying to share parts of himself, albeit through the distancing interpretational lenses of drama, persona, irony, and humor. Of course, the ultimate result is that we can now only see David through these many disparate pieces, his biography and memories of self becoming fragmentary pieces of a large and unrecoverable narrative wholeness – a description many would use to explain the fractal postmodern nature of his literary work as well.
“Adulatory public narratives of David, which takes his suicide as proof that (as Don McLean sang of van Gogh) 'This world was never meant for one as beautiful as you,' require that there have been a unitary David,” Franzen would write about him in Farther Away. Since David's own indeterminate views on this subject, and his secrecy, had made a highly detailed image of his symbolic or real self nearly impossible, those who wished to create a symbolic unitary David for statue-based worship purposes simply assumed that the low-resolution representation of David created through fame and marketing would suffice, and set themselves to smoothing out any inconsistencies and adorning the known fragments with adulation and assumptions of moral virtue – Franzen would evoke this sense in a metaphor of maps of an island, “What looked like gentle contours from a distance were in fact sheer cliffs.”
Not all posthumous recollections were adulatory, especially as more of the negative realities of Wallace's life emerged, but even negative recollections were still highly fragmentary: some compared his suicide with the death of Kurt Cobain, and shared the similarly imprecise (and likely baseless) trope that David had also killed himself to increase his fame and preserve his legacy (Franzen included); many simply blamed David's choice to go off of his prescribed anti-depressants for his death, even though switching or reducing medications is hardly a death sentence for most patients; some made veiled comparisons to the death of Hunter S. Thompson, whose 2005 suicide was motivated in large part (according to the note he left) by the author's having become old and tired and generally bored of life, claiming that David had similarly become bored with fiction, pointing to a letter that David had written to Franzen in the early aughts that he had become bored of himself and tired of repeating the same tropes and techniques in his writing. Chuck Pahalniuk, author of the mid-90's breakout hit Fight Club, remarked to Brett Easton Ellis (with whom Wallace had his own issues) on Ellis's podcast that 'taking things too seriously' is the best way to end up hanging from a rafter in Claremont. Of course none of these narratives are wholly true, some may not even be partially true, but they are common enough to exist in the culture as thought-terminating cliches: an easily employed linguistic diaphragm to protect the conscious mind from guilt or having to consider potentially damaging or unpleasant information. Consider another of the most specious – 'suffering is necessary for art' – which has been the rationalization favored by many who are conflicted when (for example) a cherished musician dies, which allows those who employ it to simply ignore the realities of their life and the effects of addiction or depression, and to let themselves off the hook for any psychic guilt they may feel for caring more about the output of an artist than the artist's well-being. David's widow Karen Green expresses a similar thought about the myth of the suffering artist in one of the few public interviews she ever granted – “I don't think it's the case... people just don't understand how ill he was. It was a monster that just ate him up, and at that point everything was secondary to the illness. Not just writing, everything else: food love, shelter... David's work was extraordinary and cause for celebration, but not from me. Does his death make it more poignant? Yes. Do I think, if he had lived, he could have made it as poignant as he saw fit? I do. Which is why I can't celebrate it... I still have a different ending (for him, and for me): It's the one where he controls his own damn poignancy and also kisses me goodnight...”
Many of the perspectives of people who knew him best are still understandably soaked in grief, disbelief, shock, and anger, but even these narratives are often still fragmentary or entirely based on the context of their particular relationship with David and how it was viewed after the fact. Green's recollections, collected in the harrowing and beautiful visual/poetic book Bough Down, recall and evoke the traumatic twisting quality of their final year together and David's multiple attempts to take his own life, and the years of grief afterwards, spliced together with snippets and fragments of hospital intake forms and suicide notes. Passages like “June. Black. Is this how it begins?” and “It's September again” show the final years of David through the shifting sand-castles of grief and trauma left in the wake of his death, but cannot truly evoke the detail and memory of his life except through ghostly reveries like “I pray you back to me and there you are, in the indigo paper jumpsuit. Honey, you smell agathokakological.”
The most daunting, but potentially revealing strategy for someone attempting to summit the psychic peak of David Foster Wallace is to simply read his fiction, his most intentional conscious creations and expressions, for information about what was happening in his mind. As Franzen notes in Farther Away, “At the level of content, he gave us the worst of himself: he laid out, with an intensity of self-scrutiny worthy of comparison to Kafka and Kierkegaard and Dostoyevsky, the extremes of his own narcissism, misogyny, compulsiveness, self-deception, dehumanizing moralism and theologizing, doubt in the possibility of love, and entrapment in footnotes-within-footnotes self-consciousness. At the level of form and intention, however, this very cataloguing of despair about his own authentic goodness is received by the reader as a gift of authentic goodness: we feel the love in the fact of his art, and we love him for it.” The idea that Franzen brings up, the merger of form and intention, is a crucial point of consideration. Some reviewers of Infinite Jest had raised the possibility of the book simply being an attempt to project the writer's subconscious literary phallic structures onto the book market with a massive (read: throbbing) 1000 page meat-hammer, which while may be formally descriptive, is anything but accurate to his personal and emotive intentions for the book. Underneath all other issues, David was a sensitive (to his own needs, maybe not to those of others) person with an earnest desire to communicate to and titillate an audience. You can clearly see how hard he worked towards making his books accessible and enjoyable, attempting to seduce and encourage the reader while challenging them, not simply creating an impenetrable experience that alienates the reader (as was his experience studying philosophy at Harvard) or a mentally ill screed that was not capable of considering the needs of the audience (as was with the case with Mitchell Heisman, about whom more details will be arriving in the next paragraphs).
I find the comparison between DFW and Mitchell Heisman entirely impossible to avoid. Heisman, a frustrated academic and psychology graduate from Albany, moved to Somerville (near where Wallace and Costello had lived in the late '80s) to attempt to make contact with some notable Harvard professors like Steven Pinker, in hopes of getting a prestigious research position at the University. While working menial jobs around Boston, Heisman constructed his own titanic manuscript, posthumously titled Suicide Note in light of facts that will soon become obvious, eventually ballooning to nearly 2000 pages of interwoven perspectives on the necessity and cosmic/literary/philosophical justifications of suicide. Heisman, almost certainly an obsessive fan of Wallace, left no record of exactly when these literary efforts became actual ideation and intent, but after some initial attempts at publication of the text failed, Heisman enacted his plan to act on his beliefs. Likely channeling a warped interpretation of Wallace's suicide that the death of an author virtually guarantees the posthumous release of their most recent project, in 2010, Heisman traveled to the Harvard campus and shot himself in the head in front of a tour group of prospective students on Yom Kippur. In both Wallace and Heisman, one can see the extreme emotional toll of neurotic displacement of mental illness into creative output, and the desire in the final moments to strike a decisive blow against a symbolic opponent in ones own internal struggle – For Heisman, Harvard, and for David, Home.
Reading Suicide Note and Infinite Jest side-by-side is a revelation in the effect of intention on the structure, content, and form of a story. Heisman is clearly evoking Wallace: the mix of highly developed academic language with references to art and history, and registers of free indirect discourse that are at turns neurotically self-concerned and casually everyman-like, the book itself whirling with prose and kicking off referential asides at a brisk pace. Yet, the differences are noteworthy and instructive, whereas in Wallace the primary commitment is to aesthetics, humor, drama, and impressing upon the reader that the author is aware and hip enough to not simply be doing this literary dance for your attention, in Heisman this crucial 'consciousness of audience's perception of performer' self-referential mode is absent. Heisman does not have the capability of understanding how he comes off to the reader, and as a result of this his performance is not taken as a clever or entertaining entreatment to the reader, but rather as an extremely grim and worrying glimpse into the author's mental state. Consider the story Good Old Neon, whose entertaining aspects, and the meat of its dramatic givings, is precisely the consciousness which is aware of how this story will come off to the reader, the neurotic self-obsession of the protagonist writing a suicide note which is really a series of polite explanations for why this has happened, all the while considering how this suicide note will be received by his sister when she reads it: without this hysterical self-consciousness, the story would simply be a warning of a future tragedy. Heisman's Suicide Note is precisely that level of grim foreshadowing, and immediately the reader sees to the core of the situation – you are reading a text constructed by an extremely unstable, mentally ill man who is superbly intelligent and deeply disturbed, and this will likely end badly.
Another comparison that I find impossible to avoid is the comparison to the British painter Brian Charnley. Charnley, a heavily medicated schizophrenic, painted (albeit intermittently) as a way of communicating to his potential audience the perspectives that shaped his life, and to express his feelings through an artistic medium that was more comfortable for him than the primary communication of feelings directly to people in your day-to-day life. In this comparison you can see a shared intention with Wallace, and certain similarities in temperament, but Wallace was relatively high-functioning even for a severe depressive: Charnley, however, was significantly debilitated by his disease. Charnley, like Wallace, became convinced that his anti-psychotic medication was messing with his ability to create art, and began a process of drawing down his dosages to see if it would modulate his art output, which rapidly led to a deterioration of mental health and eventual suicide in 1991. Both died by suicide in their early 40s, however their final experiences could hardly have been more different. In the final months of Wallace's life there was absolutely no fiction writing, very few letters, and hardly any activity other than laying in bed watching television, whereas the final months of Charnley's life was his most prolific period: he produced 12 increasingly violent and surreal paintings illustrating the downward spiral of mental health that was occurring, along with extensive journals and notes about exactly when medications had been stopped and started, and what individual images meant to him at the time. Two things can likely be inferred here: Wallace was not a schizophrenic, and “getting off the pills” (or indeed any destabilizing event) will not mean the same thing to everyone, even in remarkably similar circumstances. Mental illnesses are distinct and require accurate diagnosis, statistically studied effectiveness of treatments and likeliness of crises both will differ wildly between different categories of mental impairment. The question of diagnosis hangs over the Wallace biography and associated writings: Franzen mentions it in Farther Away, “I will pass over the question of diagnosis (it's possible he was not simply depressive)...” and DT Max notes that doctors may have considered him a manic depressive, but he was never formally diagnosed as bi-polar, instead as having 'atypical depression'. If we are to have a conclusive understanding of David's final moments, we must try to understand his illness.
That Which Shall Not Be Named
As mentioned previously, David was diagnosed with 'Atypical Depression' sometime after a mental breakdown in his young adulthood. It is now commonly recognized that 'atypical depression' is an outdated euphemism for axis-2 psychiatric disorders, also known as 'personality disorders'. Had David been born, for example, in the 90s, the chances of him being correctly diagnosed would have been much higher, but psychiatric understanding of PTSD and Axis-2 disorders was only in its infancy in the 1980s when David first sought treatment for mental health issues.
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, a leading researcher in the modern idea of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, and one of the first to study the connections between PTSD and childhood trauma in the early '80s, received significant resistance from the psychiatric community for his insistence that there are knowable connections between developmental trauma, the trauma of war, and the body's stress response, and while personality disorders and disassociative disorders had been described clinically, there was as of yet no consensus that there was considerable inter-linkage in both cause and effect of all of these disorders. Many mainstream clinicians in the early days of this research considered that only the most extreme cases of incest, abuse, or neglect could cause a child to be traumatized to the level of a soldier returning home from war. As Dr. van der Kolk's research developed throughout the decades, a clear picture emerged of the facts – an adult in war is fully developed and psychically defensible, but a traumatic event can be catastrophic, whereas simple instabilities and stresses which are standard features of adulthood can have a significant effect on a vulnerable child, even though (or maybe precisely because) they are more capable of adapting to abrupt change. In addition, due to the deeply personal and psychologically rooted reality of the phenomenological world, events and memories do not even need to be ultimately real in order to hold a physiological trauma response, and various forms of confabulation can occur as a result of the mind coping with real trauma which is only symbolically represented in the consciousness as a false memory, night terror or anxious rumination. These patterns often continue into adulthood, and contribute to the development of our sense of self.
Additionally, the biases of psychiatric professionals even as late as the middle 20th century led to predictable patterns in diagnosis and misdiagnosis of axis-2 disorders in their patients. Since most doctors considered personality disorder patients to be mostly women, men were excluded from being diagnosed in principle, or were sorted into the more masculine categories of 'anti-social' or 'narcissistic'. Since personality disorders were only considered in the most extreme cases of provable incest and abuse, many patients were simply dismissed as neurotic obsessives, ruminating depressives, or hysteric attention-seekers. Currently, most of these terms have fallen out of use entirely, along with 'atypical depression', pertaining to their use as euphemisms to cover a missed diagnosis of an axis-2 disorder – David self-diagnoses as a ruminating depressive (with anxious hyper-hydrosis) in a note during his college years. Wallace's college roommate Mark Costello in an interview with BBC Radio opines, “I'll reveal my bigotry and say that this isn't Sylvia Plath, this isn't someone who has created this work around a sort of a melancholy, a fairly small melancholy,” and yet the comparison is extremely apt. Plath, another 'attention-seeking ruminating depressive', having sought mental health assistance in the era when 'fumigation of the vagina' to treat 'wandering uterus syndrome' was only a few decades past, and when there was still little clinical differentiation between borderline personality disorder and schizophrenia (the former term being first coined in 1938 and the latter only taking on its modern definition in the decades afterwards), is now also considered to have suffered from BPD, and that it would have been a direct causal factor in her suicide. Modern studies show that up to 70% of BPD patients attempt suicide, and 10% complete it.
Borderline (also called Emotionally Unstable Personality Disorder) patients are also known to display tendencies towards being highly creative and expressive, although not consistent in output, either during times of stability or crisis. Another speculated EUPD case from history, St John of the Cross, wrote the timeless Catholic classic Dark Night of the Soul, whose pages describe personal and emotional turmoil expressed through the language of religious apologia. Franz Kafka, whose similarities with Wallace were partially noted in an earlier section, is also thought to have suffered from either borderline or schizotypal personality disorder (or maybe both, as co-morbidity rates for axis-2 disorders can be as high as 65%). It becomes hard to deny that the internal need to express the turmoil of ones psychic condition is present throughout Wallace's life and work when you look at the list of diagnostic criteria and note the prevalence of them:
Frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment
A pattern of unstable and intense interpersonal relationships
Identity disturbance and persistently unstable self-image or sense of self
Impulsivity in at least two areas that are potentially self-damaging (e.g. spending, sex, substance abuse, reckless driving, binge eating)
Recurrent suicidal behavior, gestures, or threats, or self-mutilating behavior
Affective instability due to a marked reactivity of mood (e.g. intense episodic dysphoria, irritability or anxiety usually lasting a few hours and only rarely more than a few days)
Chronic feelings of emptiness
Inappropriate, intense anger or difficulty controlling anger (e.g. frequent displays of temper,
constant anger, recurrent physical fights)Transient, stress-related paranoid ideation or severe dissociative symptoms
While not all nine criteria are major themes in his work, many are, and every criteria is present in the biographical details we have about his life. Another point worthy of noting here is that PTSD and personality disorders damage the brain's endogenous cannabinoid system, which in mammals is linked with self-soothing feelings, behaviors and attitudes, one of the primary mechanisms which prevents PTSD patients from self-calming. David's early and persistent marijuana use would have been a clear attempt at self-medicating an incredibly disorienting mental health issue. In his 30s when he got sober, he asked a sponsor if he could go back to smoking cannabis to help him stop using alcohol. In another of the tragedies of misdiagnosis, he was convinced by his sponsor that this would constitute a violation of the program's commitment to drug-free living. Being without the medicinal effects of marijuana for the first time in his adult life, which was the main pharmacological treatment for the ruminating thoughts that accompany PTSD and personality disorders, the following years were made more difficult for David to find reliable and consistent mental calm, and considerable interpersonal struggles followed therefrom.
Another significant effect of the misdiagnosis contributed directly to the events leading up to David's death, as well. Personality disorders do not generally improve long-term simply through application of psychiatric medication, yet, early psychiatric doctors, in their zeal to help their young patient with the cutting edge techniques of the time, kept David on a series of anti-depressant medications, including the 70s staple MAO-Inhibitor Nardil, which David took for over two decades. The long-term effects of psychiatric drugs are poorly studied, but generally result in debilitating health effects when stopped, regardless of the class of drug, although MAO-I withdrawal is considered to be noteworthy for its relative severity. In the final year of his life, frustrated with his lack of progress in either emotional well-being or towards finishing The Pale King, and finally being in a stable relationship, Wallace decided to go off of the drug. EUPD patients' unique characteristics of difficulty seeing the self projected through time can mean that extreme chemical withdrawal or pain can feel like an infinite experience with no foreseeable end. Wallace fictionalized a version of his sobriety experience in Infinite Jest through the character Poor Tony, resisting painkillers while in the hospital with a gunshot wound and describing the pain that accompanies awareness of time's never ceasing flow.
Friends of Wallace certainly would have seen warning signs and diagnostically relevant symptoms, but since cultural representations of personality disorders are quite rare, it's entirely likely that nobody who would have seen the signs could have correctly interpreted them. Many cultural representations of disassociative identity disorder and personality disorders were frequently overblown, murderous or framed in a way that the audience is to believe the sufferer is faking the disorder: Sybil, Primal Fear, and Three Faces of Eve come to mind. Even relatively accurate representations still displayed the biases of their era, like the 1999 release Girl Interrupted, which seemed to reinforce the common belief that borderline personality disorder was a disease exclusively relevant to troublesome teenage girls.
Here's Mark Costello unknowingly hinting at symptoms #2-6 of the DSM symptom list for EUPD while describing moving in with Wallace in '89: “Dave had just had a breakdown in Illinois, a very serious one, and had come east and said 'Let's live together'. He now considered himself cured, because he was constantly considering himself cured. Every week he was reinvented, 'Okay, that didn't happen, now I'm this...' – he called me and said, 'Let's live together, I'm going to get a PhD in philosophy from Harvard'.”
Here's a line from Farther Away in which Jonathan Franzen hints at symptoms #1-4, 6-7, 9 while describing David: “But if you happened to know that his actual character was more complex and dubious than he was getting credit for, and if you also knew that he was more lovable—funnier, sillier, needier, more poignantly at war with his demons, more lost, more childishly transparent in his lies and inconsistencies...”
Adrienne Miller's In The Land Of Men, shows two distinct versions of David which were highly intertwined in their relationship – the extremely insecure and needy writer in constant need of validation and reassurance, and the confident dominating and egoistic David which often came out in response to his desire to pursue a romantic entanglement. These unique threads to his personality became enjoined in his relationship with Miller, and oscillate with disorienting results, as Miller recounts anecdotes about conversations where Wallace would be, each in turn, condescending, recriminating, jealous, nervous, bloviating, needy, overbearing, emotionally withholding, ruminating, magnanimously validating, vulnerable, closed-off, kind, self-aggrandizing, cruel, and more. Seen through the perceptual lens of a young magazine editor, still unsure of her own place in the world, the tornadic effects of David's personality would have been surely unmooring.
Some people may not have even really understood that he was unwell. One of the particularly strange elements of a personality disorder is that the psyche is dis-unified but individual pieces are often fully functional and developed for use in certain circumstances. These 'personas', often called schema in modern psychiatric jargon, can become sufficiently disassociated into the alternate personalities on display in disassociative identity disorder, previously called 'Multiple Personality Disorder', and in all axis-2 disorders the patient develops and utilizes these stable personas to connect to others, avoid social criticism or concern, shield the inner self from potential damage, and allow for temporary psychic continuity to the patient's experience. The affect is difficult to parse when meeting a personality disorder sufferer for the first time, they can often seem extremely well put-together and charming, and the presence of severe discontinuities like breakdowns or outbursts of anger can be some of the only outward signs that the person's inner life is in a state of revolving chaotic emotionality and disturbance.
Breakdowns and angry outburst are rife in Wallace's biographical details. He breaks his hand punching a fridge after being rejected by a girl from his school at a party, punches through a car window during a fight with Mary Karr, and punches through the window of a small grocery store while blackout drunk in Boston just before entering recovery. He has at least seven major mental health breakdowns that severely disrupt his life, often seeing him withdrawing from university, quitting jobs, or moving back home to live with his parents. Symptoms were beginning to emerge as early as 9 or 10 years old (as is common for BPD, although it cannot be diagnosed officially until adulthood), progress to significant impairment from panic attacks in high school, and move to completely debilitating mental breakdowns by his sophomore year at Amherst.
Clues are obviously present elsewhere in his life and fiction as well: the continuing presence of suicide as a theme of his work, the endemic drug use and television watching to soothe a malignant self, characters who deconstruct and reconstruct identities as they move through recovery or therapy, the affective sadness and absurd quests of characters whose persistent feelings of emptiness and incorporeality lead them to extreme measures to assert themselves as alive. There may even be reason to think that David may have been attempting to describe his feelings about something in his own childhood in his short story Incarnations of Burned Children, which sees a toddler damaged so severely by a household accident that it creates a life-long tendency in the child to disassociate from pain and discomfort.
What is harder to see is the family dynamics that are always humming under the surface of every childhood subconscious. Throughout most of his life, David would insist that his childhood was normal and happy, and yet glimpses of a slightly less flattened version of events would surface, like the character Leonard Stecyk in The Pale King, whose perfunctory politeness and attempts at people-pleasing perfection turns him into a social pariah and frequent target for bullying. He wrote early poems as a young child that mused on the possible reasons for his mother's frequent bouts of mental anguish, and even once remarked that he wanted to become a doctor to help cure his mother's 'nerves'.
Wallace's parents were understandably reticent to participate in their son's posthumous biography, and both have since died as well – Jim in 2019 and Sally in 2020. Only scant information about his childhood remains, most probably contributed by David's sister Amy. Amy, who by any public account seems to have been spared the mental health troubles of her brother, reaffirms David's memory that their childhood was mostly normal and good, but the details in Max's biography of Wallace notes that Sally was prone to fits of stress and poor mental health, both parents worked and were not always emotionally available, the children were part-time latch-key kids and sometime after David left for college, they divorced and lived apart for a year without much in the way of further explanation. This is not to say that, for example, both parents working or being divorced will always cause debilitating mental health issues in their children, or anything like that – rather, these instabilities are possible statistically significant contributors to the development of childhood mental illness that warrant noting.
Another major contributor to the development of a personality disorder is the disease's relatively high rates of heritability: a measure of the likelihood of the disease passing through generations. Heritability does not signify a genetic passing, but rather a combination of potential genetic, epigenetic, cultural, behavioral and familial causes that are not always straightforward to parse apart from one another. In his thirties, David had committed himself to regularly attending therapy as part of his alcohol and drug recovery, and had become convinced that his own issues were intertwined with Sally's issues: he believed that she had been abused by her own father, and her attempts at walling off the pain of abuse had led her to a strategy of walling off and compartmentalizing all uncomfortable stimuli, and thus his own uncomfortable or less-than-perfect attributes had led to her partially walling off David as well, teaching him to hide parts of himself from people to avoid them disliking him. Later, he would fictionalize the revelation in the story Suicide as a Sort of Present.
David's belief about his mother's mental illness and his satirizing her as stern and hyper-sexual in Infinite Jest created serious rifts in their relationship, and for many years they only talked when David would have a question about grammar. When he would fight with Mary Karr, she would occasionally call him a 'Momma's Boy'.
The Pale King
Questions of interpretation of complex literary works can be vexing, especially so when the point of the analysis is to reverse-engineer the mindset of the author (many professional critics and academics do not approve of the technique in principle), and triply so when the author is a particularly noteworthy literary head-case. Don Delillo in a letter to Wallace (Delillo had been a long-suffering correspondent of Wallace's for many years) that the novel, in its essential solitude and uncharted psychic vistas, was a “long march to the mountains.” Reverse-engineering this process then, is like reconstructing an entire mountain chain using only a rough map of part of its terrain, made easier if there are many maps and many sources from guides who conducted sherpa runs to the distant peaks.
Wallace's editor at Little, Brown, Michael Pietsch (who helped reconstruct The Pale King from the fragments left behind at Wallace's death) summed up his experience as entering into “this landscape which was not just a world that he had made, but also a world that he had made himself a character in – so, I was shocked as I began reading these pages, just five months after he died, and there he was on the page.” Pietsch knew nothing about the book beforehand, only that Bonnie Nadell (David's lifelong agent and personal confidant) had told him it was a book about accounting, boredom, and the IRS. It was left to Pietsch to reconstruct the landscape, and recompile the map that was destroyed. One of the things that Pietsch hadn't expected about the fragments of The Pale King was their extensive focus on the bizarre childhoods of the characters who form the staff of auditors and examiners at the Peoria, Illinois IRS processing center. Nor did he expect the extent of the development of Wallace's ideas on transcendence through boredom and rote tasks. He was discovering through the text the landscape of Wallace's final years: the intense scrutiny of his own past, the multiple layers of identity that make up an individual, and the sheer force of his philosophical mind ramming full speed into the problems of self, suffering, trauma and recovery.
In an interview with the BBC, Pietsch discussed his views on the question of Wallace's illness potentially overshadowing the story that was being released three years after his death, saying that “it would be against human nature for people to read the novel that he left unfinished without looking for ideas about his state of mind as he was writing it, and there's no question that he was struggling with severe depression – I did not know the extent of his condition or of his medication, he kept that entirely private – people will look for that and they'll see, I believe, a heroic struggle on these pages, someone grappling with issues of life and death: How can one live? That's what he's asking himself, and that's what this book is asking, and its a terrifying question.” For David, the answer to this question had been for years that he must live through writing – to summit of the distant peak that is the 'long march' towards the most deeply held goal, that one should live, that one should write; to ascend to the summit and to touch the roots of ones own world-tree, the source of connection between all versions of yourself, and to look down over your literary creations with the power to shape universes with a pen, and the duty to work for the betterment of either self or other as you see fit. For a writer, this apotheosis is unparalleled, and to touch it even once leaves a lifelong impression deep within you that great things are achievable with the effort of the Gods – David describes this ancient view of the individual as conduit for the divine inspiration himself in his essay How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart.
This essentially Herculean task – to hone ones own technē , train in the Olympiad, and ascend Mt. Olympus itself – is a self-centered Western religious narrative, and was invariably going to be easier to pursue (conceptually) than the quieter self-skeptical religious notions of Eastern philosophy and Buddhism that The Pale King was purportedly based on – simple self awareness, quiet calm, and easy tenacity to gently overcome the psychic veil that separates personal boredom from the slipstream of eternal consciousness. Since he could not himself get past the elusive 'self' and through the veil of māyā to the pure-bliss lands described by skilled meditation teachers, he was left with the old-fashioned Herculean method – to channel the strength of the Gods and to shape the world as you see fit. However, with his intentions to show a three-part arc for his characters (child, adult, immersive practitioner of awareness), he needed to come up with a solution for what sort epiphanic and life-changing revelation can bring one to the same simple awareness of the Buddhist, but through some significant and interesting literary device. Of course, the Buddha would laugh knowingly at this idea, since by definition the self that is great and achieves through great effort is precisely the part of the self that cannot fit through the veil of illusion, or perhaps more accurately that the veil itself is simply the inside wall of the self's own self-limited perspective.
“He was expecting a Jungian rebirth,” Karen Green would comment about David's decision to go off Nardil. Reading The Pale King, it's hard not to notice that of the tripartite movement of the characters, it is the latter stage which is invariably missing, the sections in which characters access the elusive 'immersive' powers of noteworthy coworkers at 'The Service' for themselves, and find themselves thoroughly and completely changed – He states the theme of the book in the line: “We fill pre-existing forms and when we fill them we change them and we are changed.” He also seemed to struggle with the lost connection to his own personal Peoria (and his childhood memories) when he moved to California, the final years bringing only spurts of fresh work as he worked to squeeze the recollections of the Midwest out of his subconscious mind. Most of the setup work had been done, many of the characters and their backstories had been plotted, and the only thing that was left was finding the core of the story's structure and the thematic turn to close the book. In a final effort to overcome the limitations of his own perspective, he would use the world-shaping power of consciousness and channel its remaking effects into himself, in the hopes that a transfiguration of his internal landscape would show a path to the highest summits of his capabilities. He had experienced this transformation to some degree during his time in recovery, and he suspected that there were higher vistas to reach than the one atop which Infinite Jest was constructed: He knew he had a potentially great book, he just needed to know how it ended.
Endings always frustrated Wallace – many of his books end with contrivances or plot devices, and the ones with semi-traditional endings often end with a metafictional 'flying up its own ass' or a suicide, and sometimes both. There could be many reasons behind this: he may have lacked the sense of the flavor of poignant moments that typify classic endings due to his mental health and addiction issues, his personal psychology (as impulsive and compulsive as it could be) may have resisted the gradual change that typified a normal character arc, he may simply have never practiced the literary techniques or dismissed them as too conventional. Whatever the reason, his decision to ensure The Pale King had an emotionally satisfying ending was a daunting goal for a writer who felt he lacked the toolkit and experience to really pull it off – but that may have ultimately been the reason why it was so important to him. The aesthetic had once again become the personal, the personal had once again become the universal, and the Herculean task was set for Wallace to showdown against himself and risk it all to create a piece of fiction that could justify his existence.
At Yaddo in '87, David had nearly worked himself into a psychotic break while attempting to rapidly recreate his lengthy novella Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way from memory after his only draft of the story was stolen from his car during a visit to NYC. He apologized to his agent in a later letter, saying that he had “had to get myself into a sort of state to finish the thing,” and had by any account had a seriously upsetting few weeks, including crying in front of his then editor at Viking, Gerry Howard, and running out of his usually ever-present marijuana stash while living at the artist's colony and experiencing significant chemical withdrawal that he abated with heavy drinking. Wallace considered Westward his most important work for most of his career, although he would begin to distance himself from the story in later years, dismissing it as pretentious. Westward begins straightforwardly enough for a postmodern yarn – a clear parody of John Barth's Lost in the Funhouse, Westward sets its sights on treading the same ground but making the spectacle of the Funhouse acceptably more complex and stupefying to suit the absurdity of late 80s capitalism. Instead of a family road trip, Wallace assembles a cast of characters who are themselves various metafictional representations (Like Mark Nechtr, a Wallace stand-in who is addicted to 'fried roses' and plays a solo-oriented competitive sport where wind and trajectory are of crucial importance {Nechtr, Archery, Wallace, Tennis.}, or Ambrose, a character lifted from Lost in the Funhouse and a stand-in for Barth) and sends them on a quest to Collision, Illinois to attend a gathering of former actors from McDonald's commercials. As the novella draws to a close, the story in true Wallace fashion, both features a suicide and flies up its own metafictional ass when Nechtr, to impress Ambrose, writes a story featuring two characters 'Dave' and 'L_____' (whose fictional selfhoods are metafictional representations of David and his then-girlfriend Gale Walden), and proceeds to describe (As Nechtr) David (as a fictional character) describing how he's pretty good but not that good at competitive archery (which sounds exactly like his explanations of his past in tennis that can be viewed on countless mid-90s TV interviews of Wallace) and preening about his own self-awareness while blaming the turmoils in his relationship solely on the weird and hippyish 'L_____'s mood-swings and whims. In the midst of a heated argument, 'L_____' pulls out a competition arrow and stabs herself, while Nechtr describes the scene with sophomoric gusto to Ambrose, replete with penetrating metaphors, blood, and a shaft still inside the body of the now transfigured woman.
This tripartite consciousness of David's internal feelings, the literary persona, and the representation of self as subject in literature comes to dominate Wallace's work and subconscious mind in subsequent years: existing simultaneously as David, the formal and emotionally stunted boy who has difficulties relating to people; Dave, the streetwise slacker writer and logical whizkid that formed the basis of his adult persona; and “David Foster Wallace, author of such works as Infinite Jest and Brief Interviews with Hideous Men”, the culture's impression of him that he was constantly and fruitlessly attempting to curtail and control. No genuinely felt feeling of David can be expressed by Dave without sufficient fictional cryptography, lest David Foster Wallace be asked about it on the next book tour. Celebrity, while it has many cultural benefits, also exerts its own pressures on the boundaries between self and other as perceived by the celebritized – a notion that David had considerable issues in dealing with healthily, as it added yet another layer of refractory self-consciousness into the internal calculations of an already beleaguered mind. He fictionalized brooding scenarios about the distinctions between self and other under numbered titles like Yet Another Example of the Porousness of Certain Borders #24. Many public figures can calmly retreat into private family lives and keep a respectful distance from the constant watchful eye of the culture, but David, already so needy and insecure, would experience extreme fits of manipulation, withdrawal or over-dependence towards friends and lovers whenever the stress of public life encroached on the quiet mountains of his internal solitude. Living with an undiagnosed personality disorder likely played other key destabilizing roles, for example, when the success of Infinite Jest failed to make him feel whole (thinking erroneously that the sense of chronic emptiness and incompleteness was primarily achievement-oriented, and not in fact an emotional consequence of mental illness) David had a crisis of faith in the very act of writing that he dedicated himself to so sincerely. Almost certainly other milestones like college graduations and maybe even his marriage would have also provoked similar bouts of dread, bringing with them the wretched thought that if even on a day of great importance he didn't feel emotionally whole and present, then what chance did he have to ever feel this way? He likely believed that the only thing that could possibly solve the problem was the creation of another big book. The book.
The image of man and his triumph over the daunting nature of a mountain is deep in the valleys of the collective unconscious of our species, seen in pyramids and ziggurats as symbolic religious worship of the mountain, encapsulated in ancient myth, and even in our language – the symbol is so immediately graspable that the mountain is often the go-to image when one seeks to employ a metaphor about heroic struggle. It is precisely a heroic struggle that aims to be recaptured by adventurous climbers seeking to conquer a distant peak, the metaphor returning to the concrete world of dangers and deadly exposure. It is a prototypical hero's journey, complete with an ordinary world that stands in juxtaposition to the magical world of the journey, perils, obstacles, preparation, and a final confrontation that leaves one transformed and returning home with a spiritual boon-- the apotheosis of the successful climber, albeit into a temporary divinity. Most climbers begin dreaming of returning for another more challenging climb not long after being home, and many will head back to the magic world soon after for another pop of that sweet transcendence of self-limitation and accompanying brain-pleasing cosmic accomplishment vibes. You can clearly see a similar logic in Wallace's final years and his decision to go off of anti-depressants as an attempt to summit the mountain one more time – tired of the stale calm of marriage and teaching, yearning to once more experience the thrill of fulfillment that comes with finishing a great novel which had saved him from the brink of disaster the last time around.
This plan was anything but foolproof, however. Anytime one endeavors to take serious risk, there is always a chance that it does not work or that despite your best efforts some unforeseen disaster strikes. It is the very fact that unforeseen dangers are so prevalent that makes elusive distant and difficult to climb peaks so deadly. After yet another letter of David processing his feelings through personal correspondence, Delillo attempted to reassure David that the constant feeling of gnawing anxiety he felt toward the act of writing was a good thing, saying that “the novel is a fucking killer”, and that anyone who respects the form and the sacrifices necessary to create good work will be nervous because they are aware of the dangers. Of course, it is precisely because the path is fraught with personal and emotional danger and the act of success in traversing it is also the act of traversing one's own limitations and fears that makes for such a powerful feeling of transference upon returning home.
Wallace's undiagnosed personality disorder would have played a few more final tricks on his perception of his life. Close readers will have already noted that Wallace's quest for wholeness and authenticity and completion/achievement was a corollary for his desires for his fiction, himself, and his relationships. He wanted to feel whole and complete, instead of empty and broken as he had most of his life. With very little understanding available to him (personality disorders hamper the sufferer's self-insight) and very little knowledge of his disorder commonly known to doctors and professional mental health advocates, his only guiding bellwether would have been how he felt, inside. Many of his struggles with drug addiction were seated here at this confusion (drugs make me feel good, ergo, they must be good for me), but also many of the paradoxical decisions that he made, especially in the months after stopping Nardil (I feel terrible, therefor everything that is happening to me right now must be terrible). Wallace was never possessed of a sunny disposition or even a vaguely positive affect, he was for most of his life a bit of a petty grumbler – persistently uncomfortable, anxious, mildly unhappy, dissatisfied often, and easy to tempt into a temper. It's not hard to see why a tremendous surge of good feeling was such a boon to his psychic state, after the relative psychic lulls of his day to day consciousness. In the periods after completing a big project, Wallace would feel electric with possibility and positive feelings of regard for himself, but quickly it would fade and he would be back to his normal level of low-grade discomfort and now with no project to work on. This up-and-down motion of mood in relation to a tremendous transference of psychological energy from successful creative endeavors plays out repeatedly in David's life, with the release of most major book projects seeing Wallace enter into a period of elation followed by a lengthy depression. To an addict, this surge of good feeling followed by lengthy fallow periods was a pattern all too familiar and comfortable. Fiction to his mind was the designer drug of the ages, one that was created not in a laboratory or grow-house but under the floorboards of your own mind.
As any addict will tell you, one of the most prominent effects of becoming addicted to something is that everything that isn't that something becomes immediately less important to you. Addiction shrinks everything in your psychic landscape down to minuscule proportion to make more room for the single most important focus of your desire and intention – more. Anything that gets in the way of acquiring more of your drug-du-jour is seen for what it has become to you – an obstacle. For someone with a personality disorder, this effect is amplified (since the condition already does extensive warping of the relative size of the objects in ones inner life) and anything that doesn't lead towards your current fixation will utterly fail to captivate you. Absolutely anything which, while possibly being good in itself, isn't the thing you really wanted, will cause you to feel less about it, and since you have no basis to judge the worth of things other than how you feel about them in the moment, you have created for yourself a permanent dissatisfaction loop – I don't know what I want, I feel frequently uncomfortable and withdrawn. I get a thing, it isn't what I wanted (because I don't know what I want) so I don't feel very strongly about it, and since I already feel pretty bad and the new thing didn't change that, I must not like it very much. Imagine running a thousand copies of this pointless script in your internal processing all day, with every possibility taking on incalculable gradations of possibility and very little graspable sense of how you actually feel. One can get a sense of why strong narcotics are a favored thought-stopper for people with this sort of ruminating confusion about themselves and their internal feelings and motivations.
Mountaineers talk about the Death Zone, the strata of height wherein oxygen levels have dropped so low that hypoxia becomes an imminent reality even when standing still and preserving your energy. The low oxygen level produces general confusion, which then prompts the climber to make paradoxical and dangerous decisions, like undressing when frostbite begins to set in or pushing through dangerous conditions in a delirious gambit to clear the summit. Since the 50s it has been common practice to bring along oxygen masks to abate some of the clear dangers of low oxygen environments, where there are already enough dangers to content with aside from the failure of your own mind. Extreme depression, addiction, mental illness and trauma are like their very own hypoxic environment. The mentally unwell have considerable difficulties with decision making, and often treat themselves paradoxically through addiction and self-harm. For someone with a personality disorder, the disorienting effects of this emotional hypoxia are terrifying, because any light inconvenience, emotional disturbance, or stressful situation could send one into a tumbling descent. Psychiatric medication is then like its own sort of bottled oxygen, allowing a person suffering from a mental health issue to find some stability and reduce the imminent dangers to themselves. Of course, psychiatric patients are also prone to their own sort of paradoxical undressing, with many contriving reasons to stop taking anti-depressants or other prescribed medications without considering the possibly life-altering consequences. In a hypoxic environment, the real world and the world as seen by the climber, critically low on oxygen and limping towards fate, become blurred beyond knowing.
And But So...
Many eager explorers have come to Ignosi, the land that abuts the Sea of Sophia, to explore the temples and shrines of the Hymnalia mountain range, and the exceptionally brave among them often attempt to summit the most foreboding of peaks that occupy the range – Kirjallisuus. To summit Kirjallisuus is to join a pantheon of immortal heroes who are forever remembered as the explorers and caretakers of the mountain, and its eternal legacy is a draw for many who seek greatness during their short time on earth. Many seek to buy passage as far to the top as feasible, an entire industry exists around the mountain to assist the eager, and others content themselves to staying at base camp and making short excursions on the relatively safe and level planes of the mountains down-slopes, but only the precious and daring few attempt to take the summit through sheer force of will and personal expertise.
“Kirjallisuus is a fucking killer,” remarks one of your guides.
Many iced corpses of the aspirant class, and some even of veteran cragsmen and sherpas still dot the landscape here. Still others, crippled from previous expeditions up the mountain have perished with their bodies back on flat lands, but their spirits have never left this place. The flags of many previous expeditions and forward teams jut from around the pathways to the top that have been established, but the serious ones who comes to Kirjallisuus want no other outcome than to find their own way to the top. Charting your own path to the peak guarantees your passage into the halls of the timeless ones, and likely fulfills all personal hopes that your expedition becomes a classic whose techniques are studied throughout the ages by future generations of explorers.
One of the most recent to die here, a veteran explorer of the many lower peaks around Kirjallisuus, had set himself to breaking his own previous records and for many years had prepared a plan for how the summit could be taken from a different direction, from the Westward face, and had made previous attempts that set records and inspired many others to attempt the Westward slope, but never completed the summit to his satisfaction. He made another much more successful attempt, but eventually felt unsatisfied when other expeditions began to get close to the flag he had planted. When he tried again, this last time, he had gotten within eyesight of the high-water mark of his previous attempts, but feeling encumbered, had decided to remove some his supplemental oxygen and make a break for the peak. His plan failed however, when the lack of oxygen sapped his energy and soon he found himself unable to even return to his previous rock shelter and retrieve the oxygen. Soon he perished, with a pile of maps nearby that had ceased to be useful once the energy to persist had gone.
There were reports that a small band of sherpas who had assisted the climber in previous assents had come and discovered the body, suspended there above all of creation in its perfect stillness, and had recovered all but one of the maps – the final map which was clutched in the hands of the climber was permanently and irrevocably destroyed. As they pulled the fragments of the shattered parchment from his hands, it was as if the landscape itself was shifting around them, and a mighty snowstorm began to blow from all directions – down had become up, up had become down, the land suspended in the air by a tether to the sky, flatlands became hillsides and gentle hills turned to sheer cliffs, and the clouds were like bubbles floating on top of an infinite blue ocean. Facts disintegrated into streams of indeterminate datum, and falsity now consisted of all the world's most urgent truth. The sherpas were sure that they too would be lost until beams of warm yellow light shined both from outside of them and from inside of them, and illuminated the way of all things, guiding them on the path to return home, back down the mountain and towards the sea. Only one sherpa remained on the mountain, stuck in the snow at the peak and growing tired. You, the one who had insisted that they needed to see the peak for themselves once the snow cleared. There, alone before all creation, the urge to sleep became too great for you to ignore.
* * *
You wake up with a flashlight in your face. Your body is stiff, frozen. You are dizzy, and the fuzzy feeling in your head combined with the bright and pure white light streaking into your pupils makes the world around you seem like a snowstorm on the moon. There are dozens of voices around you, considering you as they heft your body, which to them seems to appear weightless or full of a weight that is no longer strictly physical, they carry you gracefully down the slope, through winding corridors of distant memories, down through tangles of branching possibilities interspersed with bright flashes of light and long, foreboding bits of darkness, while images projected on illusory dividing lines between hallways made entirely of choice are really images of you, living moments that you cannot recall no matter how hard you try, because each is replaced in turn by a new image that itself will be replaced before it is comprehended.
Some time later you return to waking life, emerging psychically into a dark space, where the air smells of damp and dirt, and your eyes focus to a bear-skin affixed to the wooden lattice that defines the area of the tent suspended a few feet above your head. Your tent. Your sense of home, tied to every item nearby, and the complex interwoven nature of memory and identity supplant you with the sense that all is well. You have woken up here many times, and will again, a new day has dawned and brought you with it. There are voices outside, and you know it is time to go a half-second after your ass is already off the ground to go, and since the voices are friendly, you do not bother to grab your father's old bronze axe.
Out on the road is an old companion whose name you cannot recall, dressed in fresh skins and draped in glory, who walks excitedly down the path that leads to the clearing at the edge of the forest. “Badaguas coept ouindho eusu dedent, siste pro roudo marvos catu.” he says to you, motioning to catch up, and so you follow him, wondering what could have happened that this 'Pale King' was captured by a small party of raiders, or what he did to deserve the punishment of the Great Red Death Battle. You feel the crunch of rotting acorns and dry twig below your feet. Down the hill that slopes gently through thatch and briars sits the clearing, which is mobbed with throngs of people who have come from many nearby places to witness the festivity – Helvetii, Cheruscii, Anglii, Marsii and Bructerii, Fosii, Marcomannii, and more. Each clan in its most festive coloration, each man woman and child adorned in the most immaculate furs and the finest copper bijouterie. Each in their own extent, they have known of the exploits of this foreign king, and as you pass through the crowd you hear people talking of his constructions of elaborate mausoleums, his advice to other rulers, the stories of exploits of his youth. Many had a positive impression of this sovereign before stories of his exploiting and abusing his court officiants and members of the peasantry began to circulate. There is an air of anticipation and tension which is becoming palpable.
You begin to feel self-conscious as you weave through the crowd behind your old companion, as you notice in turn just how much effort each person has put into their appearance: with unimaginable finery from every corner of the known world, baubles and trinkets of personal remembrance, leather straps and attire from previous wars of conquest, trophies of glory, notched swords. Each of them, their representations of themselves donned as an attire of spectacle, in the hopes to be seen among the crowd. Even their being here, their being present in the spectacle is also a part of this approach to the self-adornment, to participate in that which presents itself, and to do so in a way that maximizes the potential of their being seen as a good and valid participant in the festivity. You realize that you have never thought like that and that as a consequence you are wearing what you would wear any other day, and you haven't thought to strap every possible memory and prize to yourself, you do not believe that you would be seen as a top-tier participant in the events of today. The events of now. Part of what you will be judged on will be how enthusiastically you participate, how jubilant you are to witness the deconstruction of this corrupt monarch. People watch you as you slice and weave through the crowd. Notice you.
Down in the center of the clearing, through the crowd and a hundred yards past, stands a giant statue of wood, consisting of logs, timberbark and hewn planks in proportion, still being busily constructed by a team of laborers in odd garb – black fabric top-garments and a thick blue fabric sewn tightly around their legs, and whose shoes and caps were otherworldly. Tall metal poles, the color of a moonless night, thrust up into the sky, spaced evenly around the clearing, and shoot sideways firelight down towards the statue. Half the distance between the statue and the crowd, there was a strange constructed platform, the fabric around the sides contained three Roman letters: C B S. You begin to feel ill, and the edges of your mind flutter in an unhealthy seeming way.
As you come close to the boundary between the edge of the crowd and the beginning of the space that runs empty down to the raised platform, you begin to notice the churlishness of the people behind you, who consider it rude that you would walk between them and the glowing spectacle, and so you sit down in the front, next to your companion, and affix your eyes on the rectangle that has been constructed for your collective edification. All eyes are affixed firmly down-front, and a crawling silence overtakes the crowd. What was glowing bronze skin is now growing pallid and gaunt in the dim reflective glow of the lights that beam the images of what is about to unfold directly down your optic chiasm and straight into your brain. The images bring with them untold cultural secrets, whispers of things only half-known, new words and patterns of conditioned thought, molding your mind from the inside-outwards. Somewhere in the back edges of observable space, you feel yourself shrivel.
Arriving onstage to light applause and a general stirring of wakefulness amongst the viewing audience: Johnny Carson, who is wearing a Victorian era nightgown and cap, and nervously clutching a Colt .45 revolver at stage left; Pat Sajak, dressed in 2nd century Roman Centurion armor and holding a spear engraved with 'ROTA FORTVNAE' on the hilt, is at full military attention at stage-right; and Bob Barker, festooned is a wildly lavish purple three piece pimp-suit with matching (but lightly accented) cravat, pocket square and cane, is standing at stage center with a Revolutionary War captain's hat with an extremely large peacock feather in it. You have a light headache that you feel like probably won't go away for a few days.
Bob begins his opening, lead-in monologue to welcome back at-home viewers:
“Alright everyone welcome back to another sensational inter-temporal sweeps week. Give a big round of applause for everyone at home whose tuning in, won't ya folks? *mildly enthusiastic applause* Now today we have something very special planned for all you out there who have been tuning in, today we are going to play the classic at-home participation sweepstakes game, Erasure Tonight! Normally, we like to play this game with a live victim *cheers, knowing laughs from audience* but this season we are unfortunately playing with someone who has been dead for a few years *groans, audible booing from back* but don't you worry, his corpus was frozen and preserved for just such an occasion, so there will still be plenty of opportunities for hair-raising, flesh searing fun. How about that folks? *general nods of approval, silent complicity* It's David Foster Wallace, author of such books as Infinite Jest and Brief Interviews with Hideous Men! *audience applause notes general approval, hype*
We have hauled down his icy corpse from the summits of literary greatness, and included every copy of every book and magazine issue that ever featured his work, including every half-read copy of Infinite Jest from every lit-bro's bookshelves. We have retrieved the bandannas and headscarves of every single white man from every conceivable timeline (except for Axl Rose who was preemptively grandfathered into a protection clause vis-à-vis potential time travel chicanery that may effect his signature look). Are we all ready to watch it burn? *applause, cheers, nostalgia*
Additionally, as an act of charitable good will and exemplary respect and honesty for the timeline reconciliation process, we have secured promissory notes ensuring that Zadie Smith and Dave Eggers cannot, under threat of timeline destabilization and possible erasure, mention David Foster Wallace or his effect on their literary output. That's great news isn't it folks? *clapping, whooping*And who could forget the exciting news that Jason Segel, Jesse Eisenberg, and David Lipsky have agreed to a unilaterally nonbinding, totally voluntary (and in the view of all parties involved, quite willingly entered into) agreement that will ensure that no unanticipated ripple effects are likely to ensue, these measures include (but are not limited to):
Jason Segel hereby swears to never again wear hair extensions and attests that he has already given up both bandannas still in his possession from the production of The End of the Tour.
Jesse Eisenberg hereby attests that he will never again play a role where he portrays a journalist, although he could not promise never to play another character with nervous energy. We will continue to monitor this situation as we deem it necessary to ensure intra-timeline continuity.
David Lipsky has voluntarily surrendered all tapes to all unreleased interviews of minor celebrities so they cannot be unwittingly turned into Rolling Stone retrospectives.
We thank them for their dedication to continuity, truly consummate professionals, give 'em a hand everybody! *uproarious applause from the studio audience.* Also, by this point I believe it should go without saying, but will not actually go without me saying it, that we have seized all physical copies and cloud-storage data-sets of the film and included them for tonight's festivities. Now whose ready to play?”
Bob steps downstage towards the edge of the platform and points directly at you, and says, “How about you, would you like to be the next contestant on Erasure Tonight? Then come on down!” You stand to approach, your legs are weak from sitting, you are jittery, unsure. The crowd behind you bristles with jealousy and tingles with the anticipation of schadenfreude. A wave of energy runs through the crowd, and through you, and through the hosts, binds with the particles of light beaming through the dozens of Aputure LS600D Light Storm Daylight bulbs, and streams skyward towards destinations unknown. As you move towards Bob with upturned eyes, a hurried little roadie in a black shirt scampers up to you with a lit torch. “We got you a little gift for participating today,” Bob says, “and don't you folks at home worry, we got torches for everyone.” *tremendous applause, howling* “Alright, head on over to the staging area and make your decision.”
You walk the 1,079 paces towards the roped-off area in front of the statue on the other side of the clearing. The audience is no longer watching you, instead they have turned their attention back to the stage banter now happening between Bob and Johnny. Bob is taunting Johnny, telling him that now's the time and if he doesn't do it, Bob will have his job recast next season. Johnny, agitated, waves the Colt .45 revolver vaguely in Bob's direction. Bob stares menacingly back at him.
“Point that cannon at me one more time Carson and I'll put you in the dirt.”
“I... I... don't want to do it man, please you can't make me do it. I have kids and a wife.”
“Stop sniveling or we'll replace you with Leno.”
Carson is crying now, and he wipes his tears away with the back of his gun-hand, he starts to speak, “You know what, man... That's--” but when he moves the gun back away from his face, Bob mistakes it for aggression and clips the back of Johnny's ankle with his cane, knocking him flush to the ground. Carson flicks the gun to his side, and Barker kicks him twice in the face with the heel of his purple pseudo-snakeskin cowboy boots. Carson is crying again, laying on the floor cowering. Bob kicks the gun back in front of him. There is blood beginning to soak into Carson's white nightgown.
Pat Sajak has not moved a perceptible inch since the show began.
Bob walks back to center stage for the pre-action lead-in monologue, “Well folks its almost that time, remember to vote from home using the iCBS app or go to www.cbs.tt to vote online from any timeline cluster you happen to be in right now. We here at Corporate Broadcasting Services for Time Travel integrated at-home and digital entertainment always want to hear from you, our loyal viewers.”
Carson is crawling behind him now, whimpering and repeating the Hail Mary prayer under his breath. He's got the pistol in his hand and it drags on the ground when he moves his arm to take another step. Watching him crawling across the stage, you get a sudden sick feeling as a memory somewhere deep inside of you dislodges: a cold morning in Massachusetts, everyone is gathered just outside of town, and there's a young woman tied to a post with logs at her feet, surrounded by a crowd of jeering onlookers. A local man who was found with the witch repeatedly kicked on the ground, and he's crawling around there as the Earth cakes mud into his black tunic. You close your eyes when the Bailiff approaches with a torch, but you can't close your nose... The low-grade headache that's been bothering you since the show started begins to sear and ring in your ears and drowns out the screaming. You take a deep breath, your head is quiet now but you can't quite remember what you were just thinking about, which is good, really – because it strikes you that you've not made a decision yet, and the time will soon come where the lights and cameras, and accretive psychosocial pressures of millions of at home viewers viewing you, will swing your way and it will be your time. And whether you are ready you will be asked to choose, and your choice will matter and will have consequences that you will live with whether you have really considered them or not. You look back towards the stage, and towards the crowd. Sajak is now upstage stage-right, in the corner looking down at you. His demeanor seems encouraging, entreating, though he remains silent. The light of the Aputure 600D bulbs off of his bronze armor is brilliant, dazzling.
There is a loud crack and a wafting smell of gunpowder. It is the starting pistol of your sequence, the time for your big moment, your fifteen minutes of bona-fide time in the sun. Any moment now, the attention and gaze of every light and every lens will be here for you, and will stay on you only long enough for you to define yourself for the first and only time in the eyes of the at-home viewing audience. Ready or not. Some spotlights begin to beam your way, but the audience remains transfixed on Carson – burbling, bleeding out on upstage center. Bob begins, “Alright folks, whose ready to see the results?” *audience ecstatic, alive with possibility*
Have you decided what you'll do with that torch?
Pat Sajak looks down at you and says, “Caveat Lector,” as Camera C pans hard to the right and begins to center you in frame, and here it is: the moment of your grand unveiling. Break a leg.