Brief Review of a Hideous Man

On David Foster Wallace (for the Nth time)

This piece has been excerpted and expanded from the ‘David Foster Wallace’ entry in Neo-Passéism, a series by the Neo-Decadents.

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America’s foremost postpostmodernist was self-conscious to the point of solipsism, so anxious of (or perhaps panicked by) his influences he envisioned no methods of escape. The ghosts of his generation weighed like nightmares on the man’s brain. Crushed under this weight, he invented nothing beyond new ways to stultify his readers and squander his talent.

My encounter with (what is in all but name) his manifesto taught me as much. In my second year of high school, my class listened to his famous Kenyon College commencement speech, ‘This is Water.’ In my nascentism, I regarded his words with equal parts curiosity and skepticism. His argumentation was circuitous and convoluted but there was, I thought, some emotional truth. I acknowledged its broad gestures towards self-awareness and meaning-making even though I would’ve hesitated to call it formative. When I revisited the speech for this review, I found my initial skepticism justified. It reconfirmed ‘This is Water’ as a shameless melange of ideas cribbed from Chinese syncretism, but rendered secular and tautological, therefore meaningless. Its psuedo-Buddhist-Taoist ideas mixed with fluffy Gen-X self-reflexivity wouldn’t read out of place in a contemporary self-help book. By the end of its choir-preaching, fresh graduates are prepared to do little more than ‘be aware of the world around us.’ This may prove mildly useful for minute emotional problems or general brain fog, but, ironically, holds up poorly against the wider issues of national failure which Wallace consistently attempted to address. Any ‘truth’ conveyed here is derivative at best and shallow at worst. Three thousand words of rhetorical bells-and-whistles later, it arrives at the same conclusion Descartes made hundreds of years ago in just three words, only with less grace and more gimmickry. My school would’ve likely been better off teaching us the Dao De Jing or Taishō Tripiṭaka, but this would have meant discarding Wallacean moralising. It would have meant resisting his apophatic establishment of ethical authority and acknowledging his hypocrisy in, as A.O. Scott put it, being ‘deeply suspicious of novelty [while scrambling] to position himself on the cutting edge.’

If we are to be fair in our assessment, we should disabuse ourselves of the notion that Wallace successfully broke the boundaries of postmodernism, or that he meaningfully interrogated his zeitgeist. This concession to his formidability works only when viewing him through the Anglophonic publishing hype machine which often elevates mediocrity to highbrow, or through the rose-tinted shades of standardised education systems which Wallace was deeply entwined with. In studying his corpus, we find a man whose reach extended his grasp, whose attempts at profundity were honorable yet handicapped by sickening desperation. Formidable in elocution? Sometimes. Formidable as an author? Dubious. And in response to that old Barthesian refrain that we must separate art from artist: when the latter threw himself at the former with a velocity which could only be described as terminal, how could you? How could anyone?

Wallace’s oeuvre is preoccupied with instances of imprisonment. From the ill-fated Incandenzas and Enfield Tennis Academy, to reformed burglar Don Gately, to the Greek spy-choir of Hugh Steeply and Remy Marathe, to the characters-qua-caricatures of his short stories, to the IRS employees of the Pale King—everything remains caught within its own miserable orbit. Their imprisonment reflects both the societal milieu at the 20th century’s end as well as Wallace’s own lifelong demons. Said imprisonment consumes his narratives to a point that his ensembles feel less like lived-in communities than a collection of mouthpieces scrubbed of all dimensionality. Not to mention his nonlinear, page-jumping, multi-claused style, more akin to a series of jails you are transferred from-and-to throughout your stay. Sentences are ‘sentences’ in the carceral sense: you do not read but instead serve them with no hope of appeal. Detail accretes until it gushes, muddying any potential image in your mind’s eye. In theory, this aphantasiatic technique sounds innovative, even exciting. In practice, however, it is an approach that deadens burgeoning interest through garish prose. It is a style that buries its ledes without offering satisfying sensualism in return. It deliberately frustrates you while hoping, quite bathetically, to convince you of its morality.

The most successful variation of this style is his titular story from Brief Interviews With Hideous Men.¹ Through a mediation between the mens’ egocentrism and their unethicality, Wallace inspires discomfort within his reader. The men are pathetic in their casual cruelty and astonishing in their erudition. What makes this engaging on a metatextual level is how they utilize garrulousness to distance themselves from their own horrors, if only because Wallace was himself attempting the same through this story. Any interest to be gleaned comes less from the writing itself, which suffers from the aforementioned problems, than from Wallace’s hideousness despite his rationalisations. His insight is most compelling when it implicates him rather than instructs us.

Critic Dale Peck contested in the London Review of Books that Wallace’s writing should be seen as an improvement over Pynchon’s, insofar as its ‘carnivorous’ quality refuses to use ‘academese.’ A close reading of the work, however, contradicts this assertion. Wallace’s maximalism falters precisely due to overwrought, unbeautiful academicism. Its logorrheic syntagma reads as little more than gaudy set-dressing for what are, in reality, banal middle-class ideas regarding the 21st Century American military-entertainment-industrial multiplex. In Infinite Jest, television is the symptom via which he diagnoses the world’s sickness, and the rejection of it—to be aware that all of ‘this is water’—is the method that, he suggests, will catalyse our salvation. That the country’s fall is traceable to the rise of pre-packaged commodified entertainment is not untrue (especially when considering today’s technocratic abuse of algorithms and worldwide enshittification), but this is where Wallace’s investigation ends. Where Pynchon (his father)² and DeLillo (his better brother) would have connected the upper echelons of power to the lowest of the low in kaleidoscopically captivating passages, Wallace resorts to rote explication and minutiae footnoted into oblivion.

O.N.A.N., Johnny Gentle, subsidized time, ETA, the samizdat, wheelchair assassins: stabs at madness which reveal their jagged artifice with every page. One must imagine Wallace grinding his teeth as he overstuffs his prose with clunky parlance, hyphenations, and clauses for clauses’ sake. If I call Wallace an academic (notwithstanding his qualifications), it is because of his mind-numbing need to foreground subtext at every possible moment. Nothing is left up to chance or jouissance. Everything must be explained ad nauseum in strained self-righteous tones, all play dispensed with for the sake of congratulating those who ‘get the point’ or ‘feel seen.’ ‘I often think Wallace is performing, and I wish he’d perform less,’ says James Wood. In light of the bandana-man’s prosody, this claim becomes increasingly harder to refute.

This is not to say that Infinite Jest is without some interest. Unlike Harold Bloom, I hesitate to deny Wallace’s general intelligence, and we should not resort to hyperbole. And if I may commit a cardinal sin by agreeing with an author of such lowly calibre as Zadie Smith, I concur with her belief that literature should be a ‘broad church.’ To wit: the Eschaton game which microcosms geopolitics onto the neurotic Enfield Tennis’ Academy contains flickers of satirical enjoyment, alongside mildly entertaining imagery. Gately’s episodes provide much-needed emotional scaffolding and amusement (though the didacticism cannot help but grate). Sections and endnotes focusing on the ensemble beyond the three main storylines can be ingenious, like the syntax-breaking ‘yrstruly’ or maddening fifteen-page filmography of James Incandenza. But for every lucid moment, we receive awfully-done ebonics³, transphobic undertones,⁴ the manic-pixie-dreamification of Mary Karr through Joelle Van Dyne, boring elaborations on architecture and pharmaceutics, coprolaliac ‘humour,’ and scenes of tennis play and bureaucracy which far overstay their welcome. Wallace’s imagery and aphorisms feel weightless when one knows they will be diluted by a four-page paragraph detailing a character’s comically tragic backstory as he walks from point A to point B. Such haphazard construction is endemic not merely to the book, but the rest of his work.

Praisers of Infinite Jest insist the novel’s ostensible purposelessness is, paradoxically, what gives it purpose—that its self-consuming excess constitutes aesthetic teleology. In the only positive appraisal of the novel I can fathom, Tom Barrie argues that the ‘form of the text itself is as much the point he’s making.’ Thus, the redundancy and tediousness of the entire endeavour becomes the point. In this regard I respect Wallace, if not admire him. On principle, I am unbothered by his striving for non-linearity, maximalism, and metatextuality. I have much love for Nabokov and Borges and all of the best metafictionists. The last thing an artist should be faulted for is having ambition. One should respect Wallace’s intent to filter the novel’s themes through its ontology; what R. Scott Bakker described as a ‘semantic version of the waste continually catapulted into the background, at once a herbicide and fertiliser, making a Concavity of the interior of the reader’s skull.’ The issue, then, is not that he is attempting the avant-garde, but that said avant-garde leaves much to be desired. Tediousness and redundancy, however ingeniously framed, does not immediately become revelation. Overblown writing remains overblown writing remains overblown writing, however vigorously one intellectualizes it. Too often, after arriving at a salient insight into mass entertainment, social isolation, or addiction-as-worship, Wallace proceeds to elaborate past lucidity into prolixity, and finally into vacuous risibility. If Infinite Jest is funny, it is only because the idea of Wallace overwriting interesting ideas with a thousand superfluous pages evinces hilarity.

By attempting to sanitise the, frankly, rather cynical core of the book with platitudinous screeds, Wallace cannot reconcile contemporary ennui. He may be able to throw details on the page with no disregard for the reader’s safety, but it is an artless deployment, an unskilled literary weaving which flattens his work’s latent vibrancy. It is, as A.O. Scott called it, a form of ‘[short-circuiting] criticism’ that anticipates disparagement in order to escape its clutches. In his efforts to distance himself from irony and cynicism through an evocation of ‘New Sincerity,’ he ends up falling into one of postmodernism’s biggest traps: mere identification cannot be sustained critique. Your sincerity counts for little when it is this affected, this tone-deaf. Remain inside long enough and eventually the metatextual Ouroborus will devour you, as it did Wallace. And if there is anything postpostmodernism has shown us (in all its failures), it is how one cannot purge the excess of irony by simply reclaiming it as postironic pathos. Such reactionarism cannot be labelled a healthy resolution of dialectic, not least because it presupposes a simple binary between irony and sincerity. Wallace ventriloquises his issues, pokes fun, but cannot extend further because his mode of critique disallows it. His restatement of such ideas serves only to exasperate rather than illuminate. For all his railing against irony, he could never quite escape its shackles, remaining content with the idea that hyper-awareness was equivalent to deliverance. But fire can never defeat fire; the O.N.A.N.ite’s tools cannot dismantle the O.N.A.N.ite’s house.

Wallace is most successful when he diverts from uncontrolled verbosity and strives to be ‘aesthetically radical’ via the shattering of form and remixing of syntax; in other words, when he reflects the best of what postmodernism has to offer. Conversely, he is at his worst when he belabors undeveloped ‘metaphysically conservative’⁵ talking points into frivolousness, thereby exposing the privilege he consistently tried brushing off with cheap bathos. The lengthy exchanges between Marathe and Steeply are particularly egregious in their overemphasis of the book’s already-unsubtle themes. If these sections prove anything, it is that exposition rarely leads to compelling syuzhet, and that Wallace’s beliefs hew closer to Steeply’s acceptance of realpolitik and ramblings about ‘enlightened selfinterest’, rather than Marathe’s justified anger.

Reading this in accordance with his ‘E Pluribus Unam’ essay—which mounts a similarly underbaked critique of ‘television’, whatever the hell that means—demonstrates Wallace’s ideological superficiality. His conception of the world rests not on tangible sociopolitical forces, but on epistemological assumptions about what it means to be a ‘fucking human being’—whatever the hell this means, as well.⁶ This evasiveness is why he remains palatable to high-school and collegiate educational systems, why he continues to be discussed as a paragon of American literature despite not having any comprehensive understanding of America beyond his white, middle-class upbringing. The closest he gets to sustained structural critique is in Infinite Jest, with O.N.A.N. and its top-down relationship with Enfield Tennis Academy, but these narrative forces are so backgrounded they may as well be subvocal. Not to mention the book’s shoddy attempts at institutional analysis, which consist of repetitious bourgeoisie autofiction, dilettantish portraits of working-class backgrounds, and faceless side characters who range from thuddingly boring to downright nauseating, in the same way an exploitation flick dressed up as arthouse prestige and sanitised of contradiction might induce sickness.

Ultimately, the problem with Wallace is the same problem with metamodernism, or postpostmodernism: the ‘oscillations’⁷ between sincere and ironic/cynical and optimistic modes cannot amount to true synthesis, not when such states are plucked of actual philosophical depth. We see it plainly in Wallace’s bastard children, in Jonathan Franzen, Zadie Smith, Bo Burnham, in Redditor films like Everything Everywhere All At Once—all dialogue with our world sacrificed at the altar of ‘informed optimism.’ You perform awareness without ever actually acting upon it. You inhabit the media you loathe in an attempt to castigate it and, in doing so, find yourself fallen victim to the same artistic pitfalls. There is no sublation to be found here in the church of Wallace-Wittgenstein-lite, no development or progress. Only a stalemate, a net-zero, a fin de siècle which refuses to acknowledge its fin, which clamours for hope without presenting ways in which that hope might be genuinely supported. Sentences and images once pregnant with meaning now give way to neoliberal acquiescence, to kitschy flights of kitschy fancy: this is water, and that is all it can ever be.

1. None of the stories are worth mentioning here, naturally.

2. Pynchon is not undeserving of his own critiques, most of which can be directed towards his generational myopia and own tendency to overextend. Nevertheless, he is brought up because of how nakedly indebted Wallace is to him (see The Broom of the System, which by Wallace’s own admission is his literary equivalent of ‘Hey Ma, Look! No Hands!); but if Pynchon is two-dimensional, Wallace is one.

3. One need not be a critical race theorist to see how the ‘Wardine be Cry’ section was flawed from inception. Reading it in tandem with his ‘Tense Present’ essay on linguistic prescriptivism vs. descriptivism (brilliantly lambasted in this video) reveals Wallace’s elitist blind spots and shines light on this section’s terribleness.

4. The moral judgment laid on Hugh Steeply and Poor Tony is thick. Wallace makes repeated references to the physical incongruity between Hugh’s figure and his feminine outfits with a grotesqueness that is hard to ignore; Poor Tony’s arc is sympathetic to an extent, but ultimately predicated on similarly toxic presumptions.

5. An assessment made by James Wood in his post-mortem tribute to Wallace.

6. Curious how a man so concerned with definitionalism never bothered to define one of the key characteristics of his literary ethos.

7. As defined by Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin Van Der Akker in their ‘Notes on metamodernism’: a curious, if severely flawed conceptualisation.