Monday, 09.15.08
The Fatal Cure
photo by flickr user Steve Rhodes under creative commons license
Kurt Vonnegut, a novelist who practically begged to be put on suicide watch, thought that writing novels was a treatment for depression, if not an outright cure. Blues music, he suggested, was analogous: a way of palliating an intolerable condition by transmuting it into art. A clinical study at the University of Iowa supported the theory that depression runs in the families of writers, and a wide array of anecdotal evidence (I would cite the film Crumb) suggests that practicing an art can, if the artist is lucky, save him from the fate of his relatives.
Vonnegut somehow made it to life's finish line without taking a shortcut, whereas Wallace, sadly, did not. That Wallace's depression remained relatively hidden in his writing will make his most comic material all the gloomier in retrospect. The figure of James Incandenza, the suicidal father in Infinite Jest, might bear new scrutiny: in performances of Hamlet -- a play that pervades Infinite Jest, starting with the title -- Shakespeare played the role of Hamlet's dead father, and I wonder whether the same affinity existed between Wallace and James Incandenza. Their respective chefs d'oeuvre certainly have a great deal in common, again starting with the title, and continuing, I'm afraid, through their gleefully jejune content.
I wonder whether we can decently consider Wallace's death a sign that the postmodern novel fails as a psychiatric remedy, where the merely comic novel does not. (In Wallace's case, traditional treatments -- drugs, shock therapy, hospitalization -- had already gotten nowhere.) In Vonnegut's work I detect signs that the author was surveying the planet, and finding enough pity and bathos to sustain a life worth living. Wallace's fiction, by contrast, instantiates the same meaningless trends that are his subject, and to unclear effect. The humor reaches such a crescendo of introspection and self-questioning that it ends up as its own best critic. That critic is a keen one indeed -- so devastating that Wallace himself convinces me that his novels, in the end, are mostly exhibitions of style.
I count that as a failure, and I think Wallace did too. Is it coincidence that Wallace idolized William T. Vollmann, surely the most earnest writer of his generation? Wallace's first novel, the strange and unwonderful Broom of the System, was a novelization of Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus -- a work that argued that most philosophy was meaningless. His later fiction seems to concur. It's melancholy to reflect that this postmodern sensibility could render writers even more defenseless in their solitary and terrestrial hell than they already are.
An appreciationMichiko Kakutani pays tribute to David Foster Wallace, lauding his "keen sense of the metastasizing absurdities of life in America at a precarious hinge moment in time." |
The Salon interviewDavid Foster Wallace discusses Infinite Jest, the magic of fiction, and the existential loneliness of the "real world." |
Remembering David Foster WallaceTime remembers "the literary voice of his generation." |
In memoriamEdward Champion collects the parting words of Wallace's fans and admirers. |
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We know that he suffered from depression. According to the NYT, his father said DFW went off his meds earlier this year, on medical advice, and underwent shock therapy and hospitalization. None of it helped.
What a disgusting article. The writer is over-intellectualizing and over-culturalizing suicide. This suicide doesn't tell anything about postmodern novel or postmodern sensibility. It was all about David Foster Wallace's great pain.
Not much insight here. We have seen many references to death, suicide, and torment in DFW's writings and interviews. And there are facts. But I'm not sure these provide sufficient data to analyze the reasons for DFW's suicide. Maybe he liked Skippy peanut butter and found that he had run out of it. The dogs had eaten it but he couldn't take it out on them (c.f., his Charlie Rose interview in 1997).
"I wonder whether we can decently consider Wallace's death a sign that the postmodern novel fails as a psychiatric remedy, where the merely comic novel does not."
The answer to this portentous query seems simple enough: No.
Did Mark Rothko's suicide constitute "a sign" that Abstract Expressionism "failed as a psychiatric remedy" where realism did not?
Did Charlie Parker's self-destructive lifestyle and resulting death constitute some sort of "sign" that bebop "failed as a psychiatric remedy" where swing did not?
Some peoples' depression is just more than any treatment can help. Maybe Wallace was one of them. I haven't read his novels. Did he take the darkness head-on? Did he celebrate it? If not, maybe he should have. That's what the blues does. Maybe that would've helped, maybe not--we'll never know.
Perhaps we should consider what the world is now missing. Instead of analyzing this event and trying to conclude its meaning, maybe we should instead focus on the fact that this was a human being behind the works of such intense intelligence and wit. A human being that is now lost and taken with him a universe of potential and leaving family and friends heartbroken. The loss to the literary world is significant and those of us who didn't personally know him can be aggrieved but certainly not to the extent that his loved ones are.
His death is not an essay or a piece of prose whose meaning can be ascertained through a critical analysis. It is a tragedy and to consider it in any other way dehumanizes the man who is a loss to all who loved him.
Articles like this, innocently intended or no simply capitalize on unfortunate events such as these without providing anything meaningful to walk away with.
This piece is grotesque in its patronizing tone and its astonishing ignorance of the human condition. Graeme Wood, I count this article as a callosal failure on your part-perhaps you should explore another line of work.
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That Wallace's depression remained relatively hidden in his writing will make his most comic material all the gloomier in retrospect.
Do we know for a fact DFW suffered from depression or is that a (reasonable) assumption based on his decision to take his life?
Posted by Jeff | September 16, 2008 12:00 AM