David Foster Wallace, 1962 - 2008

The author hanged himself yesterday. I don't know what to say. That a writer -- who can arguably be called the best essayist of my generation -- chooses to leave like this makes me hold my hands over my face in horror, and starts a whole waterfall of wondering, why?

Wallace's book, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, is exhilaration qua exhilaration. Here, Dave Eggers (for The Believer) interviews Wallace about his spending time with the McCain campaign in 2000, which Wallace wrote of in McCain's Promise:

THE BELIEVER: You covered John McCain for the 2000 election, and that piece, which was so fresh and honest and unvarnished, was made into a kind of book-on-demand. Do you keep up with politics, and if so, are there plans to do any more political writing? And do you have any comment on why, it seems, there are fewer young novelists around who also comment directly on the political world? Should novelists be offering their opinions on national affairs, politics, our current and future wars?

DAVID FOSTER WALLACE: The reason why doing political writing is so hard right now is probably also the reason why more young (am I included in the range of this predicate anymore?) fiction writers ought to be doing it. As of 2003, the rhetoric of the enterprise is fucked. 95 percent of political commentary, whether spoken or written, is now polluted by the very politics it’s supposed to be about. Meaning it’s become totally ideological and reductive: The writer/speaker has certain political convictions or affiliations, and proceeds to filter all reality and spin all assertion according to those convictions and loyalties. Everybody’s pissed off and exasperated and impervious to argument from any other side. Opposing viewpoints are not just incorrect but contemptible, corrupt, evil. Conservative thinkers are balder about this kind of attitude: Limbaugh, Hannity, that horrific O’Reilly person. Coulter, Kristol, etc. But the Left’s been infected, too. Have you read this new Al Franken book? Parts of it are funny, but it’s totally venomous (like, what possible response can rightist pundits have to Franken’s broadsides but further rage and return-venom?). Or see also e.g. Lapham’s latest Harper’s columns, or most of the stuff in the Nation, or even Rolling Stone. It’s all become like Zinn and Chomsky but without the immense bodies of hard data these older guys use to back up their screeds. There’s no more complex, messy, community-wide argument (or “dialogue”); political discourse is now a formulaic matter of preaching to one’s own choir and demonizing the opposition. Everything’s relentlessly black-and-whitened. Since the truth is way, way more gray and complicated than any one ideology can capture, the whole thing seems to me not just stupid but stupefying. Watching O’Reilly v. Franken is watching bloodsport. How can any of this possibly help me, the average citizen, deliberate about whom to choose to decide my country’s macroeconomic policy, or how even to conceive for myself what that policy’s outlines should be, or how to minimize the chances of North Korea nuking the DMZ and pulling us into a ghastly foreign war, or how to balance domestic security concerns with civil liberties? Questions like these are all massively complicated, and much of the complication is not sexy, and well over 90 percent of political commentary now simply abets the uncomplicatedly sexy delusion that one side is Right and Just and the other Wrong and Dangerous. Which is of course a pleasant delusion, in a way—as is the belief that every last person you’re in conflict with is an asshole—but it’s childish, and totally unconducive to hard thought, give and take, compromise, or the ability of grown-ups to function as any kind of community.

My own belief, perhaps starry-eyed, is that since fictionists or literary-type writers are supposed to have some special interest in empathy, in trying to imagine what it’s like to be the other guy, they might have some useful part to play in a political conversation that’s having the problems ours is.

The following quote from Wallace is cut whole from Gawker; sorry.

[L]earning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about quote the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.

This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.

 

Comments

[Jackie Danicki]

So very wrong.

[Brett]

That is very sad. In my work I have been on scene of those who have taken their own lives. I always wonder what could have been so awful that they gave up thier precious life for it. I wonder if sometimes, especially for children who may be impulsive, if it is a moment of weakness which could have been forever avoided if a friend had called or intervened even innocently without knowing the seriousness of the situation.

[Nancy Rommelmann]

I was speaking today with someone about Wallace taking his life, about how perhaps the level of his brilliance was matched by his level of despair. The person said, "It's always like that," an answer which terrifies me.

[Alice Bachini-Smith]

Very interesting quotes. Maybe some people can think themselves into a state of despair by focussing their intellect on cynical beliefs, draining the meaning out of life. When your reason is devoted to such beliefs, a lucky phone call is only going to save you until the inevitable next attempt, or the one after that, or that.

[Michael J. Totten]

I don't know what to say either. This is horrible horrible news.

[Janet C]

So sad.

[Eric]

excellent post Nancy.

[Lewis Haidt]

Thanks Nancy.

This post -- esp. Wallace's steely-eyed analysis of our dissolving public square and ability to have civil debates -- is so on point.

In our over-networked, post-industrial, digital age, issues are so much more complex and inter-connected than the tired, old left/right; democrat/repubs cliches.

It is scary seeing connections, knowing that most people don't.

When I was in grad school studying with Manuel Castells (a top sociologist some consider our Max Weber) and Cory Doctorow (a civil liberties activists/BoingBoing blogger), I went to a very dark place seeing how fucked up our cities (good old toxic LA, our state, nation, globe, etc).

One things that helps me: i tell myself that I'm not -- and my blogging/writing esp. -- that fucking important.

Wallace was prob. told too much how important he is and what a burden that and too much knowledge is....