Electric Meaning: David Foster Wallace, A Literary Genius who Changed Fiction Forever

Perhaps it was inevitable that the strange curse suffered by so many great writers should strike so close to home— at least, as close as my coffee table, where Infinite Jest resides, or my desk, stacked with books of David Foster Wallace’s short stories. Even my memo board is filled with words given to me by D.F.W, scribbled on post-it notes: “You‘ve got to discipline yourself to talk out of the part of you that loves the thing, loves what you‘re working on. Maybe that just plain loves.”

News of his suicide came as a shock. He hanged himself on Friday, Sep 12, 2008 at his home in Claremont, California. He was 46, a professor of creative writing at Pomona College, and a literary revolutionist.

I had hoped one day to meet this man and glean some of his genius through even the briefest of conversations. I watched in awe of as even Charlie Rose couldn’t keep up. Now he is to become what all my other mentors are: words on pages, tinted by the knowledge of a tragic end. Ernest Hemingway, Hunter S. Thompson, Sylvia Plath… David Foster Wallace, or “D.F.W.” as he is affectionately referred to by his cult following. Lives weighed down by words in an endless struggle to articulate meaning and find release.

My fascination with David Foster Wallace began in 2006 when I bought his short story collection Brief Interviews with Hideous Men on a literary whim. I opened the book at random in Borders and began reading a story written in second person about a boy assessing the progression of puberty on his thirteenth birthday (”You have seven hairs in your left armpit now. Twelve in your right. Hard dangerous spirals of brittle black hair. Crunchy, animal hair.”) I was confused by the content and astonished by the writing. It made no sense. It was offensive. It was perfect. Foster Wallace could mesh Hemingway-esque terseness with aggressive, arrogant verbosity like no other.

“Death is Not the End,” another story in the collection, is a three-page sentence. Many of the other stories are structured as Q&As, the questions not really questions at all, but independent statements that are as equally confusing as the “answers” accompanying them. “A Radically condensed History of Post-Industrial Life” is just a short paragraph and yet an entire story, heavy with silent sadness and irony.

Foster Wallace was as obsessively unconventional in all his writing as James Joyce was with “Ulysses,” but what Joyce spent years trying to achieve through thorough planning and execution, Foster-Wallace did with an ease that only those with a supernatural level of intelligence can access. The only author able to surpass David Foster Wallace was David Foster Wallace.

To everyone else in the literary world, this was very annoying. Zadie Smith captured a universal sentiment after reading Foster-Wallace’s 1989 collection Girl with Curious Hair, saying: “He’s in a different time-space continuum from the rest of us… Goddamn him.”

He didn’t write the kind of books that people take on vacation, read by the fire on a cold winter’s night or discuss in book groups. His fiction was purposefully difficult. He wanted to make people squirm. He wanted to make his readers work really, really hard for it. But if they did, it would all be worthwhile. If they made the effort to engage, analyze and sweat their way through the pages, they would level-up onto a new plane and be somewhere nearer (although, still very far away from) where Foster-Wallace himself was standing and peering down at the world with a calculator in hand. He was passionate about mathematics, and complicated numeric digressions often pervade his writing. Sometimes it progresses into incomprehensible equations that look more like algebra than narrative. His writing is, above all, an open-ended calculation.

Or else, it is one never-ending footnote that spirals into a story different from the one it squeezes off the page. Or a collection of dictionary definitions, backward chronology, free-association, fragmentation; everything that makes meaning difficult to grasp. Any object he can find to throw in the reader’s way, he does, turning each event into an obstacle course.

This is “serious art”, and as D.F.W. once said: “Serious art is more apt to make you uncomfortable, or to force you to work hard to access its pleasures, the same way that in real life true pleasure is usually a by-product of hard work and discomfort.”

But why put his reader through all this effort, when the author could so easily hand them the plot and meaning in a neatly wrapped bundle? One possible clue is revealed in his essay “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction” (Review of Contemporary Fiction, 1993), in which Foster-Wallace explains that television has replaced fiction as the medium for access to an unknown world. “Television’s greatest minute-by-minute appeal is that it engages without demanding,” wrote Foster-Wallace. In a land of television-watchers, art becomes passive and the world over-familiarized. So D.F.W took it upon himself to switch the balance, re-claim “uncomfortable” art and de-familiarize the world.

He was hated. He made people furious. He ignited a hardcore set of “anti-fans” who accused him of pointlessness, impenetrable arrogance and wasting paper. Nowhere in my long chain of literature-lovers is there someone who has completed the one thousand-plus pages of Infinite Jest, nor have I met anyone who knows of anyone who has. There is, however, someone who was so offended by its presence that they used it as toilet paper (and it lasted six months).

To the critics: say what you will about David Foster Wallace, but the man dedicated his life to the “high art” of fiction. He poured his genius into words, sculpted meaning into a form of literary electricity, and wrote long and hard without intellectual restraint. For a short life, his works span infinity. All we can do is try to catch up.

In his own words—a sampling of D.F.W.:

“People read fiction the way relatives of the kidnapped listen to the captive’s voice on the captor-held phone: paying attention, natch, to what the victim says, but absolutely hanging on the pitch, quaver, and hue of what’s said, reading a code born of intimacy for interlinear clues about condition, location, and the likelihood of safe return…”—“Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way” (“Girl with Curious Hair”, 1989)

“Fiction-writing is lonely in a way most people misunderstand. It’s yourself you have to be estranged from, really, to work.”

“Fiction is about what it is to be a human being.”

“I had a teacher I liked who used to say good fiction’s job was to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.”

“I guess a big part of serious fiction’s purpose is to give the reader, who like all of us is sort of marooned in her own skull, to give her imaginative access to other selves. Since an ineluctable part of being a human self is suffering, part of what we humans come to art for is an experience of suffering… We all suffer alone in the real world; true empathy’s impossible. But if a piece of fiction can allow us imaginatively to identify with characters’ pain, we might then also more easily conceive of others identifying with our own. This is nourishing, redemptive; we become less alone inside. It might be just that simple.”—(An Interview with David Foster Wallace, Larry McCaffery, the Review of Contemporary Fiction, 1993)

“Serious art… is more apt to make you uncomfortable, or to force you to work hard to access its pleasures, the same way that in real life true pleasure is usually a by-product of hard work and discomfort.”

“You‘ve got to discipline yourself to talk out of the part of you that loves the thing, loves what you‘re working on. Maybe that just plain loves.”

“Sometimes things do happen. Even in reality. In real realism. It’s a myth that truth is stranger than fiction. Actually they’re about equally strange.” —(“Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way”, from the Girl with Curious Hair collection)

“The preceding generation of cripplingly self-conscious writers, obsessed with their own interpretation, would mention at this point, just as we’re possibly getting somewhere, that the story is getting anywhere.”—(“Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way”, from the Girl with Curious Hair collection)

“Hell hath no fury like a coolly received postmodernist.”—(“Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way”, from the Girl with Curious Hair collection)

“Kissing someone is actually sucking on a long tube the other end of which is full of excrement.”—(“Here and There”, from the Girl with Curious Hair collection)

“I became in myself axiom, language, and formation rule, and seemed to glow filament-white with a righteous fire.”—(“Here and There”, from the Girl with Curious Hair collection)