David Foster Wallace’s final attempt to make art moral

https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/david-foster-wallaces-final-attempt-to-make-art-moral

by lermontov • 4 years ago

98 78 4 years ago

themisto• 4 years ago

I haven't read any books by David Foster Wallace, though every time he comes up I feel obliged to share a fantastic speech of his about finding joy in the monotony of life. I heard it years ago and it's always stuck with me. Video[1], transcript[2]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CrOL-ydFMI

[2] https://jamesclear.com/great-speeches/this-is-water-by-david...

tanseydavid2• 4 years ago

I want to second this recommendation.

This commencement speech that Wallace gave is deeply moving and thought-provoking to me every time I listen to it -- and I have probably heard it at least 10 times.

I have shared it with others, most of whom have had a very similar reaction to it.

closedloop129• 4 years ago

How should one interpret the speech in light of his suicide? [1] He didn't shoot his head which suggests that his mind wasn't a master. Still, it makes me a bit worried that his thoughts could be the structure that made him suffer.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Foster_Wallace#Death

zemvpferreira2• 4 years ago

A great speech but this is the first I hear it interpreted as an ode to monotony. I've always thought of it as an essay on the value of questioning our default way of thinking in the day-to-day, on the implicit biases we carry with us into the world and how they can trap us in loneliness.

Not ashamed to say I've cried more than once listening to it. It's a lifesaver.

ethanbond2• 4 years ago

The Pale King, his last novel (unfinished at the time of his death) is a really gorgeous elaboration on the same topics as This Is Water. It is not so much about rejecting the day to day monotony of the modern world, but rejecting the default reaction to the monotony of the modern world. We have complete control over our reaction, and almost none over the reality. One line I’ll paraphrase that sticks with me still: “In the modern world, if you can bear extreme boredom, there is literally nothing you can’t accomplish.”

The general theme is that regardless of the monotonous reality, there’s still plenty of beauty and intrigue to find within it if you look closely enough.

To make this point, The Pale King is about an IRS agent and it includes long, meditative descriptions of turning the pages of extremely long tax forms. I don’t know what philosophical ideas DFW ran into explicitly, i.e. whether he was reframing or actually deriving them, but he was absolutely rubbing up against what we now call mindfulness.

Edit to add one of my favorite scenes in literature ever, with no spoiler or even narrative substance: There's a scene where two characters are talking to one another and one party becomes so engrossed by the conversation that he begins to literally levitate out of his chair. I find this such a simple description of a truly profound experience (~~flow state).

adamgordonbell• 4 years ago

This excerpt from The Pale King is powerful and I recommend it over the "This is Water" speech, esp for software developers:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJXrXf-0yoQ

People laugh, and it is a bit funny, but it's also deadly serious.

True heroism receives no ovation. It's just you against the world with no one to see or cheer.

justsocrateasin• 4 years ago

I have a calendar reminder to read this speech every 3 months. It's one of the few reminders that I actually listen to and don't just ignore.

pcarolan• 4 years ago

Infinite Jest is feeling more prescient every day ( the titular theme is about media addiction ). Worth the steep climb.

floxy• 4 years ago

Getting off topic here, but is there a word for the concept of an anti-joke? Along with examples? As in, a joke consists of a setup story, and then there is a lull or pause, enough time for the listener to contemplate what going to happen next. And then the joke teller says something unexpected but somewhat related, and it is funny. There is a moment in the speech that I would classify as sort of the opposite. DFW starts relating about the ugly people sitting in traffic with the large SUVs with religious and patriotic bumper stickers, and the crowd starts cheering and laughing, seemingly agreeing that those "others" deserve mockery. But then there comes the punch line, that maybe the others have some worse hardship like bone cancer, which is definitely not funny. Or stated another way, for a joke, the setup story is neutral, and the after effect is funny. For the anti-joke, the setup is funny, and ends somber, and maybe makes you feel bad for laughing at the beginning? The anti-joke start at about 13:28:

https://youtu.be/8CrOL-ydFMI?t=808

Hallucinaut• 4 years ago

There is definitely the concept of the anti-joke. Anti-humour has the wiki page.

The sadly-late Norm Macdonald was a good proponent.

Fwiw though I watched this after your post and I'd say that's not really the same. I'm not sure what you call this technique in speeches with such a setup but it adds great emotional gravity and is something I see and appreciate a lot in speeches like this (or even shows like The Good Place which is incredible but can't be described further without spoilers).

zafka• 4 years ago

Thanks much for this! First time I have heard this. Now saved for repeats.

randycupertino• 4 years ago

I love his cruise ship essay.

He's such a smug intellectual brat HOWEVER he's fully self-aware of his personality shortcomings and seems to set his qualms and enjoy himself despite of himself by the end.

https://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/HarpersMagazi...

npilk2• 4 years ago

Though unfinished, I highly recommend the Pale King. It's not as consistently great as some of DFW's other works, but the highs are as high as anything else he wrote and IMO it's a little more accessible than Infinite Jest. (For a new reader, I would start with some of his essays, e.g. Consider the Lobster: http://www.columbia.edu/~col8/lobsterarticle.pdf)

boldslogan• 4 years ago

Spoiler: don’t read this unless spoiled

But the part describing the teacher who wanted to kill the child was the funniest chapter of a book I’ve ever read. And I recommend this book based only on this one chapter.

I have never seen this kind of comedy in a book. Maybe something like it’s always sunny in Philadelphia or futurama comes slightly close. But I’ve never laughed out loud from a book like that.

nelsondev• 4 years ago

As for comedy in books, I find Bukowski - Post Office to be quite hilarious at times.

havblue3• 4 years ago

I liked the David Foster Wallace reader to start with. It was basically a greatest hits of his best material including a decent chunk of Infinite Jest.

rintakumpu3• 4 years ago

The first time I read Infinite Jest I was expecting something as inaccessible as Ulysses or Gravity’s Rainbow but ended up finding the book pretty readable and a total delight. And but so I would highly recommend it, just take the off-beat sci-fi setting at face value and skip the footnotes if you feel like you want to focus on the story. You can always return to those later.

boucher2• 4 years ago

I cannot imagine reading this book and skipping the footnotes.

havblue3• 4 years ago

I think it helps to read summaries or explanations of infinite Jest and not just dig into it. Eventually you get a good mental picture of the entire timeline, the rough details of how the dystopia works and how the story is told in a loop.

rockostrich2• 4 years ago

Yea, I don't really get the take that it's inaccessible. The footnotes are sometimes annoying, but usually they're hilarious.

I haven't read it in ~10 years but I think it's even more relevant, poignant, and hilarious today as it was then since we're just seeing more and more of his predictions about consumerism and self-image come to life.

jrm43• 4 years ago

Okay, I want to discuss a major thing in the book, but it's really spoilery. I don't know if hacker news has a thing for that? I'll ROT-13 it and if anyone wants to respond please do. Again, you shouldn't try to read this if you haven't read the book and dont want to be spoiled:

V'ir arire frra guvf zragvbarq naljurer -- ohg vg frrzf gb zr gung gur npghny vasvavgr wrfg va gur obbx, nxn gur ivqrb gung ulcabgvmrf rirelbar, vf rffragvnyyl whfg na nfze ivqrb naq qsj unq uvf svatre ba gur pbaprcg orsber nfze orpnzr n guvat?

nemo44x5• 4 years ago

I found Gravity's Rainbow more accessible and maybe that's because Infinite Jest was clearly inspired by it. They're both very similar in that you just have to power through the first 150-200 pages and then somehow everything starts making sense.

npilk2• 4 years ago

That’s fair. I ended up sort of skimming through it the first time reading the parts I could connect with and then picked up more of the detail (and the end notes) on later re-readings. For The Pale King, I was able to read it in depth from the jump. But that may also be because I was more mature and had read DFW before…

syndacks• 4 years ago

Infinite Jest reads like See Spot Run compared to Gravity’s Rainbow.

dizhn• 4 years ago

"And but so"

If you write like this yourself it's no wonder you'd find it readable. Or in other words I see what you did there.

iggldiggl3• 4 years ago

I first stumbled across the Pale King in my local library, and it was indeed enough to get me hooked and read first one of the collected essay books and then Infinite Jest.

adam_ellsworth• 4 years ago

The link you provided didn't work for me. I was able to find another copy here: https://faculty.etsu.edu/odonnell/readings/lobster_dfwallace...

xefer• 4 years ago

...

hammock• 4 years ago

Not to mention the pulleys and joists reasonably belong to the flagpole, not the flag or the rope (not to mention the rope doesn't belong to the flag, either)

mistersquid• 4 years ago

DFW's early short story "Forever Overhead" gives a sense of his potential and lyricism. [0]

It's one of my favorites.

[0] http://artsites.ucsc.edu/faculty/gustafson/FILM20P.W11/readi...

cantSpellSober• 4 years ago

And if you've read The Pale King, you can skip Something To Do With Paying Attention.

The content is mostly the same, seems like the release of the latter was a cash grab.

Arubis3• 4 years ago

I wish I could still love DFW's work the way I used to, but it's colored by [allegations of significant relational abuse](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Foster_Wallace#Personal_...).

redtexture• 4 years ago

From the article.

Subsequent first-person accounts came from Wallace’s friends...
...They also produced a fairly consistent picture of a selfish friend, a manipulative—and likely abusive—boyfriend, and a jealous and self-mythologizing writer. Even were we to desire to do so, there is no way to read Wallace today without knowing these things about him.
It’s worth noting, though, that for attentive readers of Wallace’s fiction, little of the news about his personal life could come as a surprise. Wallace’s great subject was the morass of selfishness, self-rationalization, and intellectualized narcissism into which his cohort of educated, relatively privileged Americans would sink—and were sinking—unless they could find something to love more than they loved themselves. A difference between Wallace and many of his contemporaries—one that sometimes opened him to charges of hypocrisy and self-delusion, not to mention cringeworthy sentimentalism—was his commitment to doing more than merely cataloguing the traps of modern alienation. This did not mean that he claimed to have escaped those traps himself. It did mean, as reflected by his attraction to conversion narratives like Fogle’s, that he hoped he could spring his readers free.

Arubis3• 4 years ago

This is fair, and familiar. A common sensation over the last half-decade or so is to be shocked without being surprised.

That this was a predictable facet of DFW's character doesn't make his purported actions less saddening and hurtful.

It's okay--expected!--to struggle. It's common--awful, but repairable!--to hurt others in the process. The open question is whether that repair would have ever been available had he lived.

everybodyknows2• 4 years ago

cringeworthy sentimentalism

This is new to me -- anyone have an example?

jquaint• 4 years ago

Yeah I totally agree. It doesn't invalidate his work but it adds quite an ick factor for sure.

boppo12• 4 years ago

Edison was pretty ruthless and a garbage-y person. Do you feel an ick factor while enjoying the modern electrical world?

Invictus02• 4 years ago

I don't get how people can care about things like this. The American Constitution was written by slaveowners, and MLK cheated on his wife. It doesn't make the Constitution worthless nor does it make the I have a Dream speech a fraud. Never meet your heroes.

Arubis3• 4 years ago

Nuance! You can do better than black and white, good/bad binary decisions.

I totally care about those other factors. And I am acutely aware of the effect that physical abuse has on real, actual people. It's unavoidable that this would effect my reading of someone's work.

That the writers of the Constitution were morally fallible means they weren't the final authority, and we should be willing to grow. They had wisdom; we should take what we can of it, and take a nuanced view. This is no different from my take on DFW: there's art and learning to be had, but it's no longer the pure and innocent enjoyment I would have had prior to knowing how personally hurtful he could be.

The MLK stuff is uncertain as yet; the FBI was clearly trying to blackmail him, but the records remain sealed. We'll know more in a couple years: https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/1997/summer/e...

rcktmrtn• 4 years ago

The fact that he killed himself colors every bit of his work to me. Whatever people may say about depression being a chemical phenomenon outside of our control, there will always be something perverse to me about learning why not to commit suicide from an author who did.

That said, I found Infinite Jest to be very insightful when I read it at a low point in my life, but I went into it knowing who the author was.

everybodyknows2• 4 years ago

His more serious journalistic pieces can be read without much reflection on the man himself.

On the politics of language:

http://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/HarpersMagazine-2001-0...

boppo12• 4 years ago

I mean, he knew he was a piece of shit and killed himself. Sort of an ultimate mea culpa. So maybe we can forgive him enough to enjoy his works.

ww-picard-do• 4 years ago

https://archive.ph/LCzr8

lotw_dot_site• 4 years ago

Infinite Jest was largely a collection of various scenes, some of them recurring and some not.

Probably the main recurring scene involves an extended conversation between Remy Marathe and Hugh Steeply on a hilltop overlooking Tuscon. Marathe is a legless French Canadian agent of uncertain allegiance and Steeply is a US agent posing as a female reporter called Helen. Closely following the back-and-forth between the two allows the reader to put together major aspects of the grand narrative of the novel.

My favorite scene was a one-off involving the younger kids (pre-teens) at a tennis academy playing an extraordinarily convoluted and physically intense game called Eschaton (think Risk played with tennis gear). If any particular thing made the 1,000 page slog worthwhile, I would say it had to be that.

The footnotes alone could have made up an entire book.

rockostrich2• 4 years ago

Probably the main recurring scene involves an extended conversation between Remy Marathe and Hugh Steeply on a hilltop overlooking Tuscon.

The Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, if you will.

iggldiggl3• 4 years ago

My favorite scene […] Eschaton […]

And a band that apparently has some David Foster Wallace fans amongst its members did a music video based on that chapter:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ni7T18UUBUI (The Decemberists - "Calamity Song")

dailyrorschach• 4 years ago

And directed by Office, Parks Rec, Good Place Mike Schur - who once definitely owned the film rights to Infinite Jest, not sure he still does or not.

UncleOxidant• 4 years ago

Oh, that's what that was about (haven't gotten around to reading Infinite Jest). Love that song (Love most Decemberists songs), but couldn't quite figure out that video. Thank you.

havblue3• 4 years ago

The state farm insurance claim passage about the brick layer is great and doesn't depend on the rest of the book.

http://infinitesummer.org/archives/608

platz• 4 years ago

“Infinite Jest” transformed private torment into a vast metafictional diagnosis of our entertainment-bedizened cultural condition, and, weirdly, sounded the first notes of a quest for an irony-free sincerity that has become a ruling style of David’s generation and the ones that followed. - http://www.salon.com/2012/09/07/i_know_why_bret_easton_ellis...
I sometimes wish Wallace had never written on irony or given that famous commencement address. Both are unfairly used as a stand-in for his entire ideology. He is in turn praised and totally dismissed by large groups of people who have no idea what his larger project as a writer really was. Also I'm pretty sure that he's made it abundantly clear that he never meant to say irony has no proper place in society, merely that it becomes a crutch and a shield for many who would rather not engage earnestly with the world. - https://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/274v9c/what_han...

https://medium.com/@kunaljasty/a-lost-1996-interview-with-da...

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/02/05/good-people

swayvil• 4 years ago

To be fair, morality is just aesthetics in a more general context.

Ie : This brush stroke is aesthetic. This deed is moral.

Both boil down to feeling-of-rightness.

But ya, that larger context. Maybe Dave is telling artists to get out of the studio.

ComputerCat• 4 years ago

Yikes, I had suppressed the memory of a terrible university prof I had who was obsessed with DFW, this instantly took me back.

llamaimperative• 4 years ago

I too hate when people like things a lot

CTmystery• 4 years ago

Reading this makes me feel quite insecure in my own comprehension of these books. I've read Pale King, Infinite Jest, Consider the Lobster, and Broom of the System. I liked them all. But I read this article and I don't really understand the majority of it, which makes me think that I also missed a lot of what I was supposed to take from the books. Genuine question, does this make sense to most readers? Do you need to be a literature major to understand this article?

jrm43• 4 years ago

Don't be. I don't think the author of this piece is saying much at all. I think they're doing a nerd thing of trying to insist that DFW had some "clear plan" that he was trying to execute. But I think what's really happening is that the author of the article wants there to be some clear plan instead of the truth that what DFW did with his amazing work defies summary in this way.

thenerdhead• 4 years ago

If you watch some interviews with DFW and other similar authors, you may come to the conclusion that nobody really knows what they are talking about and it's usually the ego speaking(including Wallaces).

I think that's the point of much of his works:

Wallace’s great subject was the morass of selfishness, self-rationalization, and intellectualized narcissism into which his cohort of educated, relatively privileged Americans would sink—and were sinking—unless they could find something to love more than they loved themselves.

While the article makes sense to me, there's plenty of filler that detracts from the point. Wallace's work was writing moral fiction for a generation ahead of his time. Many of the themes in his work are more prevalent and pervasive today than they were at the time he wrote them.

David Foster Wallace’s final attempt to make art moral

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