Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow
of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy: he hath
borne me on his back a thousand times...
William Shakespeare,
HamletTwo days ago I learned David Foster Wallace had hung himself. One of the country’s most gifted essayists, interesting novelists, a signpost of American letters: dead at 46.
Turns out he’d been suffering from (and medicating) depression for the past 20 years. For reasons we will never understand, the depression returned and proved impervious to treatment. As Wallace’s father mentioned to the
Times, DF had recently undergone electro-convulsive therapy and different regimes of pharmaceuticals, but the cloud never regained its silver lining. “Everything had been tried, and he just couldn’t stand it anymore.” Call it psycho-oxidization. Call it the Hemingway or Cobain syndrome. Call it whatever you want. In the end, the description is one of loss.
If you know Wallace, it's probably because of his massive, critically acclaimed novel,
Infinite Jest. So much info about DFW and his work is so readily available on the web that discussing either here at length is more than moot – particularly since I’ve never been a steady fan of his fiction and haven’t read even half of his body of work. If you want to bone up on him, you might begin with the three articles already in the Times or Time magazine:
Click and
Click. The latter link links you to a few examples of Wallace’s journalism/non-fiction – which, for my attention and time, were where he not only excelled but where his humor, observations, care and philosophy waxed brighter than most other writers. This elegy, then, is more of a personal reflection prompted by this sad occasion and my experience reading, with great pleasure, his two wonderful essay collections
A Suppossedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again and
Consider the Lobster, as well as one half of his story collection,
The Girl with Curious Hair (plus various stories/interviews/etc in magazines over the years).
Being a morally curious, intellectually driven individual is not merely not easy, it is not without perils. Particularly when, on top of those other identity describers, you throw in the personality-adjectives “creative” or “artistic” – which both go hand-in-hand with a nigh constant demand to produce something worthy. Something of merit. Which you can only likely and reasonably do if you participate in and, question, doubt, evaluate and synthesize not only the culture at large but also your own craft, your own work, and yourself – your own consciousness. All of which can unearth some frightening discoveries, as when Hamlet finds himself holding Yorik's skull and losing his grip on sanity. And while you’re pursuing worthy things, entering those chambers of the mind, the door to Do-Nothing-Land is always open, the trodden welcome mat eerily tempting. Because stepping through it offers you two potent, opiate-like alternatives to the hard work of being the productive person/artist/thinker you'd like to be.
The first is an outright out. A retreat into the oversimplified, self-serving, pleasure-seeking, consumer-commercial life that is mapped out and rubber-stamped and issued like pre-printed birth certificates awaiting our name. Such is the kind of living-by-rote that art in general and literature in particular so often responds to, offering up a kind of antidote of awareness and humanity.
The second is more abstract and metaphysical, and I’ll call it guilt. And maybe it's not so much an egress as a symptom of self-retreat. A core symptom: opium-like in its averse health affects. Guilt here is not the I-grew-up-Catholic or I-cheated-on-my-wife variety, but a guilt that comes from living in a state of half-participation or paralysis. Maybe it's guilt of self-doubt or failure or a sense of failure or of self-retreat, of backing away from the vision you have for your ideal self. And the real, utter bitch of having this kind of guilt is that the dark cloud is still see-through: you can clearly observe your soul, its gleaming promise and its potential to realize your now aborted but still loved ambitions and passions (I could be a writer! I could be a director! etc). The truly lame thing about feeling this particular kind of shitty is you damn well know you're neglecting elemental elements of your identity, those things about yourself that make you feel cool/proud/satisfied and deeply happy. Despite being in the dark cloud of guilt, you still know you’re capable of being better. Even though you're not pursuing your passion, you're painfully aware of it. Like a toothache that suddenly tears at your jaw when you drink too-cold water. And the guilt does not provide you the comfort of ignorance or stupidity. You understand pursuing your passions is the only way to achieve some progress, some tangible results, whether they’re poems, plays, short stories, films, etc. And producing your art or following your path, you know, is more likely to keep you within that critical mental frame of Awareness. You reach a mental altitude, a climate of thinking and feeling which nourishes a kind of psycho-spiritual ecosystem where the creative process at least has a shot at viability. And because you know all of this, whenever you don’t sit down and paint or write or whatever, you feel guilty. And sometimes that guilt metastasizes into sadness. Or depression.
If we take as a given that self-actualization is a temporary state of being (analogous maybe to a high performance engine requiring high octane fuel, calibrations, routine maintenance and occasional overhauling) then we might reasonably claim that this sweet-spot of ephiphanic awareness is surrounded by toxic cesspools and slicks that are the byproducts of its very pursuit. (ie, The more of yourself you discover, the more self there is to doubt or loathe; likewise, the more work you produce, the greater opportunity for rejection.) So, loathing and cynicism. Existential unmooring. They can bring about a bleak, mortal logic or anti-epiphany that concludes: Why bother? What’s the fucking difference? Or: I just can't stand it anymore. Such verbalizations can tug you toward the proverbial bottom.
I’m not guessing at the causes behind DF Wallace’s suicide, but pointing out conditions that exist, that I sense sometimes, anyway, in myself and in my friends and in America. In fact, America might be the best and only way to describe Wallace’s writing: Only in America does his peculiar, post-modern blend of style and thinking truly resonate with hope and inspiration and become a buttress against despair. Wallace’s essays went beyond “stimulating” my mind. His intellect struck me as infectious, even transformative, his well-sanded logic providing a surface on which my own ideas could glide. Only in America, the country that gives us a single DFW in monumental disproportion to the throngs of self-serving assholes who prosecute the most frustrating aspects of this absurd society, this strange, often maddening/saddening culture, only here is the work of writers like Wallace possible. No, necessary.
-Jason Watt
