March 13, 2009

David Foster Wallace

By: David Polansky

I read this harrowing New Yorker piece on the life and death of writer David Foster Wallace with a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. The article has a terrible Appointment in Samarra -like quality to it, detailing his struggles with depression and culminating in his suicide last year.

While I have not had direct experience with depression, I have some experience with his other source of unrest: the difficulty of bringing to completion a piece of writing to which you are passionately committed. I cannot help but feel that, in some measure, the impulses of his intellect and of his soul ran counter to one another.

Here he is speaking of his experiences with drug rehabilitation:

“The idea that something so simple and, really, so aesthetically uninteresting—which for me meant you pass over it for the interesting, complex stuff—can actually be nourishing in a way that arch, meta, ironic, pomo stuff can’t, that seems to me to be important.”

I think that he correctly intuited that a simple (or as Schiller would have it, naive) return to a celebration of the true, the good, and the beautiful — as would satisfy the Claremonters and New Criterioners — was not wholly possible. Yet it was clear from his writing, and from this excellent address , for example, that he was deeply concerned with moral and, above all, human questions.

When he says

“Fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being,” he once said. Good writing should help readers to “become less alone inside.”

I can’t think of another American writer of his stature in the past few decades saying something like this and meaning it.