I had read some pieces by DFW – for one, his piece on John Ziegler in The Atlantic – but not Infinite Jest (1079 pp of which 196 pp of notes) and it was clear from the Ziegler piece alone that here was a seriously interesting and famously depressive writer, and since I take a close and personal interest in how writers deal with their depressions, when he went and resolved his with his pyjama cord on September 12 it felt like the only thing to do was to read the big one. Survivor guilt, guilt-about-not-keeping-up, morbid curiosity about proleptic passages, healthy desire to try to comprehend the brute, mute facticity of the pyjama cord, lastly actual hope that such a huge reputation would prove to be more than the usual puff-bubble.
It is, it is. (Oh thanks say the Wallacians out there, but cut me some aging slack here).
I am trying hard to resist just adding a few paltry adjectives to the cairn on the web. But Infinite Jest is one of those books that make you want while reading it to button-hole people and quote at them, quote something from practically every page, quote whole pages, a pre-critical gushing love affair.
As at 22nd October in the O.N.AN.-ite Year of the Dependable Adult Undergarment, the first appearance of Madame Psychosis with her midnight radio show, which tonight features reading from the come-all-ye brochure of the Union of the Hideously and Improbably Deformed (“Bell-shaped steatopygiacs, in your special slacks”) as at, therefore, a mere p 190 I have become addicted. The 18th century is on hold.
Amongst the many obits online (Google and take your pick) the one that made me desperately want to read Wallace was this one by Scott McLemee, especially this bit:
In one of his last published writings (how terrible it feels to put it that way) David Foster Wallace referred to ?the sound of our U.S. culture right now? as Total Noise: ?a culture and volume of info and spin and rhetoric and context that I know I?m not alone in finding too much to even absorb, much less to try to make sense of or organize into any kind of triage of saliency or value. Such basic absorption, organization, and triage used to be what was required of an educated adult, a.k.a. an informed citizen ? at least that?s what I got taught. Suffice it here to say that the requirements now seem different…. In sum, to really try to be informed and literate today is to feel stupid nearly all the time, and to need help. That?s about as clearly as I can put it.?
He went on to mention, all too briefly, his hope that there might be ?a model for what free, informed adulthood might look like in the context of Total Noise: not just the intelligence to discern one?s own error or stupidity, but the humility to address it, absorb it, and move on and out therefrom, bravely, toward the next revealed error.?
I have been thinking off and on for a long time, not all that productively, about Matthew Arnold’s account of Zerstreutheit (‘being-scattered-ness’ maybe) and how much worse things have become since he wrote and how in particular, to adopt Wallace’s term, the Noise menaces the manic and introverted. Against this background I found what Wallace had to say compellingly accurate and brave. Reading even 190 pages of Infinite Jest shows how deliberately exposed he was to the Noise. I don’t know enough about Wallace and I am old-fashioned about these matters, so I’m not going to connect the dots here but it looks to me as if Wallace’s creative work was, like Samuel Beckett’s, heroic. He resembles Beckett as well in the love and admiration he inspired in those who knew him.
