David Foster Wallace

 

I keep coming back to David Foster Wallace’s work.  This is an old story, and one that I may have shared on this blog before, but here it is again because this is something that has been important for me.

I picked up Oblivion, the book that turned out to be Wallace’s last short story collection on the recommendation of a friend.  This guy had been pushing Wallace on me for a long time.  Infinite Jest seemed too long ( I didn’t have the same tolerance for long books then that I do now) and too much of an investment.  I opted for the short story collection, which probably delayed my actual appreciation of Wallace for a while.  

Anyway, I struggled through parts of this book and wrote off this writer.  After further insistence from my friend, I picked up Infinite Jest a couple of years later.  I struggled through it and finished it.  I thought it was dumb and pretentious.  I didn’t care about the characters and I think that my reading of it suffered because it was such a struggle and it took me nearly a year to get through it.

The problem that I had is that I kept thinking about it.  When I was in the middle of reading it, I had just started in my doctoral program at the University of Tennessee and I was trying to figure out the direction I wanted to take my studies.  I kept returning to this novel, kept thinking about it.  There was something to it that I couldn’t figure out and it got to me in a way that novels that I just don’t like cannot do.  I went through my courses and decided that I would focus on contemporary postmodern fiction (this wasn’t much of a choice, it is and was all I read).  

I won’t go into too much detail here, but I ended up rereading the book a couple of years later and the whole thing clicked with me.  The book is big and difficult to read, but it is worth the read.  I have made attempts to read through the rest of Wallace’s catalogue and have ended up putting a good dent into it.  I can say that I sort of liked The Broom of the System and will probably read that again soon.  I really like his non-fiction and essays, but I have never liked his short fiction.  Infinite Jest stands out to me as an absolutely stellar novel that is the more stellar because it stands alone among his fictional offerings as a truly, truly quality work.  

This is what brought me to Wallace.  What I am here to write about is D.T. Max’s biography of Wallace, titled Every Love Story is a Ghost Story.  I read this book years ago while I was writing my dissertation (of which Infinite Jest was the focus of a chapter).  It had just been released and it seemed like a source for good supplemental material.  I read it quickly at the time and got a couple of good quotes out of it.

Well, I just finished reading this and my take is a little different.  I still like the book.  I think that Max did a good job with the subject material.  He focuses the narrative of Wallace’s life around his writing and attempts to present a sympathetic version of Wallace for the reader.  Overall, he succeeds in doing this.  This time that I read it, however, I was more struck by Wallace’s idiosyncrasies and the unlikeable aspects of his personality.  After Wallace’s suicide, many sources went out of their way to portray the writer as an earnest, kind person.  I think that he was this.  But I think there was more to him.  I won’t get into my evaluation of him as a person here because all I would be basing it on is my reading of his work and a few interviews.  That doesn’t matter here.

Here’s the thing: I still love Infinite Jest.  I hope that it stands the test of time and continues to be a good book.  The aspects of Wallace’s personality that I don’t like don’t really matter because I never knew him.  I don’t think that he was terrible, so I don’t need to bend myself to make excuses to like him.  By all accounts he really was a nice person and cared a lot about his students.  That is good.  I like that.  

I have mixed feelings about this biography, but that is not specific to this biography.  I think that there is a problem that all biographers face, and that is how to present the narrative of another person’s life.  Max made a decision about how to write about Wallace.  He cast Wallace’s life in a particular light to achieve a particular end.  All biographers do this.  I take a page from Hayden White in this.  White wrote about history and his belief that historians cast events in a particular narrative arc: comedy, tragedy, irony, or farce (I think.  I may be wrong on that last one, I am doing this from memory).  This cuts against the so-called “objectivity” of history because it necessitates the historian’s perspective and affects the way that it is, then, written.

The same must be true of biographies.  This shouldn’t be earth-shattering.  An author must feel a certain attachment -- positive or negative -- to their subject.  And this will come through in the writing.  Wallace’s life was not a narrative, but it was narrativized.  And from a particular perspective.  

So, I reread this book after I had gotten some distance from Wallace’s work.  I still like it.  I think the author did a good job and related some key aspects of Wallace’s life, especially as they connect to his writing.  

Books I couldn't finish...

Every now and then I come across a book that I can't make it through.  I typically try to get about 100 pages in before I finally give up.  Sometimes the books are too boring, about something different than I thought, or I don't like the author's voice.  Other times the subject matter is just too difficult or too far outside my area and I don't get anything out of it.  This last is the case for David Foster Wallace's Everything and More. 
I promise not to get too deep into discussing DFW as a writer here.  But a little background on him helps to put this odd book into context.  So most will likely know Wallace for either his fiction or his journalistic essays.  His most famous work of fiction, Infinite Jest, is a monster and one of my favorite novels.  I won't write about that here.  His essays were published both in a variety of magazines and in expanded versions in collections.  These range all sorts of topics and can be pretty funny.  DFW gets really invested in his subject matter and tends to have unique and perceptive perspectives. 
In addition, DFW also has a background in philosophy that helps him to write with great exactitude.
Everything and More is a departure from the majority of the rest of his work.  This book is on the mathematical concept of infinity.  He writes the book in his signature avuncular stye and includes loads of asides and digressive information as he goes.  But this book about infinity includes a lot of discussions about calculus and differential equations and a historical dive into mathematics in the 18th century.  A lot of this is interesting and deceptively easy to read.  The problem is that the math is actually pretty difficult.  Wallace claims that memories of college math should be enough to get through the book.  While I made it through some college math, I never got to calculus and even the notations for a lot of his material is unfamiliar.  This makes for some rough going for someone not really in tune with mathematics.  This isn't a fault of the book.
One of the more striking descriptions in the book is Wallace's attempt to parse the difference between zero and nothing.  I like this because it is illustrative of the promise of the book and a direction I would have liked to see it take more.  It also helps to explain both the depth that the book takes and Wallace's ability to break down potentially difficult topics. 
In this example, he describes two students who both fail (get a zero) on a history test, only one student is not enrolled in the class.  The enrolled student receives a zero and the non-enrolled student gets nothing.  Had the book contained more like this I likely would have made it further through.
I was initially interested in reading this book because of Wallace.  I was also interested in the concept of infinity, and particularly any intersections that it may have with sublimity, another concept that I find fascinating.  Although I did not expect Wallace to address these topics in conjunction in this book, I figured that I could make those connections on my own.
In the end, I am still interested in the concept and many of the specific ideas that Wallace presents.  I may return to this book eventually if I can up my math understanding a bit.

On reading big books.

I have loved reading long novels ever since I was a kid.  Stephen King's The Stand is the first one that I ever read that was over 1,000 pages and I remember the conflicting joys of finishing it.  The book was such a trek to accomplish that I was at once proud of having gotten through it and a little sad at it being over.  This was also one of the first books that I spent a lot of time thinking about after I had finished it.  I haven't ever made my way back to re-read it, but I still might.
My later reading habits also followed this pattern.  I enjoyed the implicit challenge of a thick book.  They were almost daring me not to finish them, to pack them in after a few hundred pages.  And there have been a lot of times when, after a few weeks of reading, I realized that my bookmark was still in the first third or quarter of its thickness and was tempted to let them go.  But most times I kept going and there is generally reward in the experience beyond just the narrative itself.  Long books are journeys (he writes, tritely), and they do require a certain perspective to approach them.  One of my favorite critics, Northrop Frye, writes that reading is actually a two-part act; there is first the act of reading and then the thought about what one has read.  Some long books extend this and force us to rethink attitudes toward the book as we go.  The Stand challenged me because there were parts that I disliked and found boring.  The same was true when I read The Lord of the Rings books and ran across pages of elvish song.  There is a certain amount of boredom and drudgery that accompanies reading many large books that is a part of the pleasure of reading them because it becomes possible to inhabit the book in that time.  I can assign whole tracts of my life to the time I was reading one book or another.  The first time I read Infinite Jest, it took me nearly a year to get through it, but I always remember that I picked it up the summer after I completed my MA and moved back to Ohio and spent a good chunk of the time I was in Daytona grading AP lit exams for the first time reading it.  Likewise, the first time I attempted to read Gravity's Rainbow was when I was n undergrad and a professor happened to mention it.  I bought a copy at a second hand store that defeated me that first time.  I read Pynchon's Slow Learner collection instead because it was more digestible.
Long novels leave room for imperfection that is important to the make up of the narrative.  They seem to become less controlled as they go, which puts the reader back into the position of renegotiating their relationship to the narrative.   I like this, too, because the difficulty of a text, whether it be due to length or imperfections in the novel, is engaging.  Most long novels are necessarily complex and these complexities can reveal contradiction in a perceived world that make it more real.  Many of these novels leave loose threads or may lack resolution, but this makes them all the more reflective of our own lives.  We live each day in a mire of incomplete narrative threads.

Bertrand Russell and the Conquest of Happiness

Just recently I began re-reading Russell's collection of essays The Conquest of Happiness.  I read this the first time a number of years ago when I was in graduate school.  I read a bunch of Russell at one time for reasons that are not particularly clear to me now.  I got a lot out reading his A History of Western Philosophy, which is more of a greatest hits of Euro-centric philosophy than it is an actual book of philosophy.  Much of my reading in philosophy has been piece-meal, as I would read whatever seemed interesting to me in the moment and I took few actual philosophy classes or studied it in any major way.  I once took a graduate seminar in Descartes' work from one of the big names in the field, but otherwise most of my study in this area has been self-directed.
In any case, as I have been reading through The Conquest of Happiness again, I am getting more of a sense of the arrogance that others find distasteful about Russell's perspective.  The essays are not, properly speaking, philosophical but fall into his popular work.  He strains to apply religious concepts to his atheistic worldview as a way of explaining unhappiness, or lack of contentment in modern life. There is some home-spun wisdom gussied up as insight, such as the suggestion to work toward goals and to avoid gossip and enviousness.
At the time I read this initially, I was struggling with a failing marriage and trying to get a dissertation written.  Russell's soporifics didn't always strike a chord with me then, but provided enough for me to remember it fondly.  I am currently about halfway through the book and intend to finish it.  I remember that being an essay that was a bit more analytical that attempted to break down varieties of happiness and their sources that I found informative and I have some hope of regaining some of that enjoyment I got out of it before.

Reading this book has been a part of a broader re-reading of many books that I have been doing over the last couple of years.  I have always enjoyed re-reading books to re-experience ideas and narratives.  I subscribe to the notion that the reader brings a lot of him/herself to the experience of reading and that our acts of interpretation depend upon our personal and cultural history as well as our prior reading experience.  When I re-read books, I see new things or I see the same things differently.  I likely will have more to say about the processes of reading and re-reading and I certainly will continue to revisit books the have made an impact on me in the future.  At some point I plan on digging back into Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, but don't anticipate having the time to dedicate to it before the end of the year.

As one example of the necessity of re-reading, I draw from my own experience.  Years ago a friend of mine recommended David Foster Wallace to me.  This was in the early 2000s and I had heard the name but not read anything.  Eventually I picked up Infinite Jest and struggled through the thing for about a year.  I hated everything about the novel.  But as I began at a new school, I found that I could not stop thinking about it.  I kept thinking about how it pieced together and the significance of certain portions of it.  In the ten years since then, I have re-read that novel another half dozen times and written extensively about it.  It became one of the major novels of my dissertation and I presented on the topic from a variety of directions.  I am particularly proud of the work that I have done regarding the novel and the state of irony in contemporary America.  For whatever reason, I was not in a place to enjoy the novel on a conscious level the first time I read it but it stuck with me.  I kept working over it until I could put it in a new context and find its value.  Northrop Frye once remarked that whether or not we enjoy a piece of literature has no bearing on our jobs as critics.  This is a nice idea in general and I tend to think that we can gain a lot from works we do not like or enjoy reading.  Although, admittedly, I can't always follow this idea and am often happy to dismiss books I don't care for.