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A large part of Wallace’s appeal, for me anyway, was that you could always tell that he was kind of an asshole, ever on the verge of being cruel, and not just t

A large part of Wallace’s appeal, for me anyway, was that you could always tell that he was kind of an asshole, ever on the verge of being cruel, and not just to himself. Banishing contempt entirely may be a good way to live, but it’s another kind of death for writing. Which is one reason it’s worth remembering, as the image of Wallace as slacker saint and liberal sage hardens into Hemingwayesque concrete, that he was a Reagan voter and a Perot supporter; a jealous guy who once contemplated buying a gun to knock off a woman’s husband; and a person who put to paper both the notion that the “good thing” about 9/11 was that it brought Americans together, and that “AIDS’s gift to us lies in its loud reminder that there’s nothing casual about sex at all.” Wallace never wanted that piece republished in a collection — in fact, he wanted it forgotten. He’d probably be the last person to argue for his own sainthood. This is the DFW that always has jumped out starkly clear to me from the pages, ever since I hit on the "Yours Truly" chapters in IJ. People who try to spin him as some trans-human wise sage of universalism seem to me like the people who see Jesus in toast. He was an excellent writer, and he hit numerous home runs ("How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart" resonates with me particularly). However, I still think he would've been better if he developed less bland stances than his "apolitical but vaguely pro-status quo" fare. His romanticizing of the goodness of "Middle America", as in "The View from Ms. Thompson's" (about 9/11), is probably him at his worst.

djur 11y ago
I had a similar experience. People had really pumped him up for me, and yet essay after essay left me either cold or disgusted. As someone who has struggled with lifelong depression, I still didn't recognize anything familiar in his description of watching hours of television a day, and I couldn't agree less with his moralizing attacks on irony. And his piece on prescriptivism vs. descriptivism is basically nonsense. But it was the 9/11 essay that made me give up on him. Not just its stunning lack of insight as to what America's reaction to the attacks was and would lead to, although that was bad enough. But there's this point where he mentions that the people he was staying with didn't know where various buildings in NY were in relation to the Twin Towers; he explicitly describes his hosts' ignorance of the layout of the NYC financial district as a sign of their parochialism and isolation. What amazes me is that the eternally self-reflective Wallace apparently never considered that the vast majority of Americans, parochial and cosmopolitan alike, never have had any reason to know anything about the layout of the NYC financial district. In that moment the parochial viewpoint was _his_. DFW was a fine stylist and made the occasional apt observation, but the man doesn't even begin to live up to the myth. The best thing I can say about him is that he would have been the first to admit that, too.
- Cushman 11y ago
  > As someone who has struggled with lifelong depression, I still didn't recognize anything familiar in his description of watching hours of television a day Since I wrote elsewhere that I feel DFW's writing captures depression well, this might be a good place to clarify: I don't mean that his characters act the way I might act when I'm depressed, except maybe in caricature. I mean he writes in a way I might think about things when I'm depressed. To put it another way, I don't agree with much of what he has to say, yet it resonates.
- cjf4 11y ago
  The Midwestern-NYC ignorance was a minor part of a minor work, but have you ventured into his fiction? Despite the caricature/myth he's turned into, you don't get to that point without delivering the goods, and Infinite Jest certainly did. Stylistically it's an achievement, but moreover it had some pretty concrete and incredibly relevant things to say about modern life's alienation and addictions and the need for raw, earnest, emotional connections with other people.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
sp332 11y ago
What's wrong with Middle America?
- msabalau 11y ago
  The same general sorts of things that are wrong and right with human beings of all types. Hence "romanticizing the goodness of" being observed as the issue.
  - sp332 11y ago
    I guess so, but that doesn't seem like a bad thing to do right after a terrorist attack.
kafkaesque 11y ago
This excerpt from the article is relevant to your reaction: In a letter to a student who pointed out that the chubby Midwesterners in his State Fair essay seemed “animal-like,” he answered, ashamedly, “It’s death if the biggest sense the reader gets from a critical essay is that the narrator’s a very critical person, or from a comic essay that the narrator’s cruel or snooty. Hence the importance of being just as critical about oneself as one is about the stuff/people one’s being critical of.” What I'm getting at is that there were certainly times when DFW did say some pretty wise things, not because he was a wise sage, but because I think he sat and thought about certain aspects of life deeply. So, I'm not sure why you would have a one-sided impression of him as an asshole. Similarly, he certainly did write things that sounded like he was on the verge of wanting to go off on people, not because he was an asshole, but because he was clinically depressed. Anyway, I guess you've chosen only to remember one side of his personality, so it sounds a bit disingenuous. I don't expect people, especially in fiction, to have a flat-line, monotonous personality. A story, after all, needs to make things interesting and the mechanics of it require some tension. We can sit and judge his personality when giving interviews, where most of the time he appeared pretty calm, maybe due to the fact that he was medicated--I'm not sure--but it would be a pretty useless exercise that kind of reduces everything to gossip. His political opinions don't make him a worse or better writer. I mean, do semi-popular writers or artists have to always have a hard-lined opinion on something? He seems pretty liberal and, at the very least, not a right-wing conservative nutcase in the 2003 German interview on ZDF, if that helps any.
- drzaiusapelord 11y ago
  The problem is that what passes for intellectual thought on the internet is pretty much just fashion. I think "hit pieces" and "edgy" are just hot now for whatever reason. Vice seems to have made a good go with "edgy" material and others have followed. I imagine DFW is an easy target for millennials not terribly impressed by the 90s or whatever Gen-X was supposed to be back then. I'm surprised by the vitriol in this thread as well. DFW has always been kinda an interesting but somewhat boring smart guy and never this politicized character or self-help guru the article makes him or his legacy out to be. I also think these calls for being a conservative really reflect the extremist leftist times we are in. DFW was something of a liberal moderate and sometimes played up the positive side of traditionalism. Nowadays, in the age of "trigger warnings", tumblr brigading, outrage politics, and mindless social media; being anything but a leftist revolutionary who hates everything is a liability. DFW never sought to toss the baby out with the bathwater and that's an unforgivable sin today it seems.
JoshTriplett 11y ago
> that he was a Reagan voter and a Perot supporter In the context of the other items in the same list, that comes across as "Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking" http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ArsonMurderAndJaywalking http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ArsonMurderAndJay... ; it doesn't fit. Even "jaywalking" is too strong here, since even that is not comparable to "held political opinions differing from those of the person writing the article".

djur 11y ago

I had a similar experience. People had really pumped him up for me, and yet essay after essay left me either cold or disgusted. As someone who has struggled with lifelong depression, I still didn't recognize anything familiar in his description of watching hours of television a day, and I couldn't agree less with his moralizing attacks on irony. And his piece on prescriptivism vs. descriptivism is basically nonsense. But it was the 9/11 essay that made me give up on him. Not just its stunning lack of insight as to what America's reaction to the attacks was and would lead to, although that was bad enough. But there's this point where he mentions that the people he was staying with didn't know where various buildings in NY were in relation to the Twin Towers; he explicitly describes his hosts' ignorance of the layout of the NYC financial district as a sign of their parochialism and isolation. What amazes me is that the eternally self-reflective Wallace apparently never considered that the vast majority of Americans, parochial and cosmopolitan alike, never have had any reason to know anything about the layout of the NYC financial district. In that moment the parochial viewpoint was _his_. DFW was a fine stylist and made the occasional apt observation, but the man doesn't even begin to live up to the myth. The best thing I can say about him is that he would have been the first to admit that, too.

Cushman 11y ago
> As someone who has struggled with lifelong depression, I still didn't recognize anything familiar in his description of watching hours of television a day Since I wrote elsewhere that I feel DFW's writing captures depression well, this might be a good place to clarify: I don't mean that his characters act the way I might act when I'm depressed, except maybe in caricature. I mean he writes in a way I might think about things when I'm depressed. To put it another way, I don't agree with much of what he has to say, yet it resonates.
cjf4 11y ago
The Midwestern-NYC ignorance was a minor part of a minor work, but have you ventured into his fiction? Despite the caricature/myth he's turned into, you don't get to that point without delivering the goods, and Infinite Jest certainly did. Stylistically it's an achievement, but moreover it had some pretty concrete and incredibly relevant things to say about modern life's alienation and addictions and the need for raw, earnest, emotional connections with other people.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

sp332 11y ago

What's wrong with Middle America?

msabalau 11y ago
The same general sorts of things that are wrong and right with human beings of all types. Hence "romanticizing the goodness of" being observed as the issue.
- sp332 11y ago
  I guess so, but that doesn't seem like a bad thing to do right after a terrorist attack.

kafkaesque 11y ago

This excerpt from the article is relevant to your reaction: In a letter to a student who pointed out that the chubby Midwesterners in his State Fair essay seemed “animal-like,” he answered, ashamedly, “It’s death if the biggest sense the reader gets from a critical essay is that the narrator’s a very critical person, or from a comic essay that the narrator’s cruel or snooty. Hence the importance of being just as critical about oneself as one is about the stuff/people one’s being critical of.” What I'm getting at is that there were certainly times when DFW did say some pretty wise things, not because he was a wise sage, but because I think he sat and thought about certain aspects of life deeply. So, I'm not sure why you would have a one-sided impression of him as an asshole. Similarly, he certainly did write things that sounded like he was on the verge of wanting to go off on people, not because he was an asshole, but because he was clinically depressed. Anyway, I guess you've chosen only to remember one side of his personality, so it sounds a bit disingenuous. I don't expect people, especially in fiction, to have a flat-line, monotonous personality. A story, after all, needs to make things interesting and the mechanics of it require some tension. We can sit and judge his personality when giving interviews, where most of the time he appeared pretty calm, maybe due to the fact that he was medicated--I'm not sure--but it would be a pretty useless exercise that kind of reduces everything to gossip. His political opinions don't make him a worse or better writer. I mean, do semi-popular writers or artists have to always have a hard-lined opinion on something? He seems pretty liberal and, at the very least, not a right-wing conservative nutcase in the 2003 German interview on ZDF, if that helps any.

drzaiusapelord 11y ago
The problem is that what passes for intellectual thought on the internet is pretty much just fashion. I think "hit pieces" and "edgy" are just hot now for whatever reason. Vice seems to have made a good go with "edgy" material and others have followed. I imagine DFW is an easy target for millennials not terribly impressed by the 90s or whatever Gen-X was supposed to be back then. I'm surprised by the vitriol in this thread as well. DFW has always been kinda an interesting but somewhat boring smart guy and never this politicized character or self-help guru the article makes him or his legacy out to be. I also think these calls for being a conservative really reflect the extremist leftist times we are in. DFW was something of a liberal moderate and sometimes played up the positive side of traditionalism. Nowadays, in the age of "trigger warnings", tumblr brigading, outrage politics, and mindless social media; being anything but a leftist revolutionary who hates everything is a liability. DFW never sought to toss the baby out with the bathwater and that's an unforgivable sin today it seems.

JoshTriplett 11y ago

> that he was a Reagan voter and a Perot supporter In the context of the other items in the same list, that comes across as "Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking" http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ArsonMurderAndJaywalking http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ArsonMurderAndJay... ; it doesn't fit. Even "jaywalking" is too strong here, since even that is not comparable to "held political opinions differing from those of the person writing the article".