Reading David Foster Wallace

This is Water (2005)

The Philosophy of Solipsism

“Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience.”

In 2005, David Foster Wallace gave the commencement speech at Kenyon College. After the casual suggestion of one of the graduating students, he topped an impressive list of about twelve other nominees, including Hillary Clinton and astronaut-turned-senator John Kelly.

Entitled This is Water, the lecture stressed the importance of being constantly conscious of the choices we make in our everyday lives and how even small and seemingly inconsequential acts can have profound effects on others.

The speech and much of Wallace’s writing came from his keen interest in solipsism, the philosophy that nothing exists outside our own minds, which unfortunately can make us unconsciously and automatically self-serving. “Think about it,” he explained, “there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute center of.” By making more conscious decisions, he argued, we can turn off this “default setting,” learn empathy and perhaps find something we love more than just ourselves. It was part of his lifelong quest for what it means to be human.

Wallace was the son of professors. His mother taught English and his father philosophy. Among his earliest memories was hearing them read James Joyce’s Ulysses to each other. The family played language games and wrote letters to express their anger instead of shouting. At fourteen, his father engaged him in Socratic dialogue, awed by his son’s understanding, while honing in the perfect combination of his parent’s academic minds.

He was also athletic, playing quarterback and competing in tennis on the national level. It was a well-rounded midwestern childhood. But by his junior year of high school, Wallace began to suffer from anxiety and depression. Ashamed of his emotions, his instinct was to hide them.

The Planet Trillaphon (1982)

College, Breakdowns and Fiction

He graduated with perfect grades and went off to Amherst, his father’s alma mater. He took introductory courses in English, history and political science. Again he excelled. But in the middle of his sophomore year, he packed his bags, simply told his roommate, “Something is wrong with me,” and went home.

His parents were surprised when he returned. Although they were no strangers to depression – his mother’s sister and uncle both took their own lives – they were unsure and trepidatious about how to approach their son. They let him come and go as he pleased and patiently waited for when he might confide in them.

Instead, Wallace turned to reading and writing fiction. “Fiction,” he wrote, “took the time away. It took the pain away.” In the unpublished The Clang Birds, God hosts a game show where contestants must answer existential and paradoxical questions. Only God has control of the buzzer and the players are forced to keep playing. He sent manuscripts to his roommate and confessed he wanted to be able to write fiction that would be read for centuries to come.

His college years were interspersed with breakdowns, hospitalization and writing, told in almost autobiographical details in the short story The Planet Trillaphon, where Wallace also narrates the desensitizing effects of the antidepressant Tofranil he had begun taking in real life.

“They’re fine, really, but they’re fine in the same way that, say, living on another planet that was warm and comfortable and had food and fresh water would be fine. But it wouldn’t be good old Earth, obviously.”

Deep down, he would always feel that his inability to control his illness was a sign of weakness.

The Broom of the System (1987)

Teaching and Publishing

Wallace’s thesis paper and first published novel, The Broom of the System, explores the connection between reality and language. It was conceived after an ex-girlfriend commented that she would rather be a character in a novel than a real person and was based on Wittgenstein’s theory on language and how it shapes our physical world.

In the novel, a hospital director uses elaborate expressions that are difficult to understand and a cockatoo can repeat human phrases. The protagonist, Lenore, grapples with the meanings of language and the immense power words and symbols hold in our lives. The book is humorous and thought-provoking. Wallace thought of life as “an intellectual game,” and his belief that “the world is words” follows in Wittgenstein’s 1922 Tractatus mantra – “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.”

Right after receiving his master’s degree, he began teaching philosophy, creative writing and contemporary literature. Sophomores he knew were among his students. He would hold classes in his home and read, reread, analyze and correct their writing devotedly, many times even calling his mother to thoroughly explain the grammatical errors directly to them.

Girl with Curious Hair (1989)

Depression, Medication, Rehab and ECT

When he was diagnosed with depression, Wallace learned it was a biological condition likely to last the rest of his life. He underwent consistent hospitalizations, admitting himself – sometimes before, sometimes after – attempting suicide.

His second book, Girl with Curious Hair was published to mixed reviews and with little notice from readers. He was heartbroken. As he continued his studies at Harvard, he suffered a relapse and was taken to McLean, the renowned psychiatric facility poets Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell and Anne Sexton were admitted to in the past.

There he was prescribed Nardil for the first time. The antidepressant has been around since the 1950s but because of side effects, including changes in blood pressure and food interactions, it was not recommended to be taken for long periods. The drug seemed to work and Wallace was released to a halfway house. He took his rehabilitation seriously and worked hard to wean himself off alcohol and marijuana.

He was terrified of electro-shock therapy and the damage it might do to his mind. “My brain is all I’ve got,” he said. Then added, “But I could see that at a certain point, you might beg for it.” During his worst depression, he underwent twelve ECT treatments.

In the short story, The Depressed Person, Wallace describes an unhappy woman in therapy who blames her lifelong ails on her parents’ divorce. The tone is ironic, full of self-absorption, and is meant to be more humorous than sad. Although he never published anything directly about his own mental illness, it isn’t possible to read his stories without making the connection.

“Paxil, Zoloft, Prozac, Tofranil, Wellbutrin, Elavil, Metrazol in combination with unilateral ECT (during a two-week voluntary in-patient course of treatment at a regional Mood Disorders clinic), Parnate both with and without lithium salts, Nardil both with and without Xanax. None had delivered any significant relief from the pain and feelings of emotional isolation that rendered the depressed person’s every waking hour an indescribable hell on earth.”

Infinite Jest (1996)

Addictions and Recoveries

During his bouts of mental illness and depression, there were times when he thought writing was not worth the anxiety it caused, and other times when he felt writing was the only way to subdue the maddened voices in his head. And it was during his cycles of addiction and recovery – in the hospitals and AA meetings – when he met people from different backgrounds and found the multitude of stories he would incorporate in Infinite Jest.

Here, the main character, Hal Incandenza, a talented tennis player and pothead, is again autobiographical. The theme of addiction centers on a film of the book’s title that is so engrossing, anyone who watches it loses all interest in other things and eventually dies from watching it too much. Set in a dystopian future where all of North America has become one country while a separatist group tries to acquire the film cartridge to use as a weapon, Biblical in length – 1,079 pages and 388 footnotes – it catapulted Wallace into the genius of post-modernist literature when he was only 33.

One of its many unique styles is the listing of life lessons such as –

“That you will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do. That it takes great personal courage to let yourself appear weak. That no single, individual moment is in and of itself unendurable. That, perversely, it is often more fun to want something than to have it. That other people can often see things about you that you yourself cannot see. That there is such a thing as raw, unalloyed, agendaless kindness.”

The book also succeeded in his quest to write “morally passionate, passionately moral fiction” as he put in an essay on Dostoevsky, even having fashioned the three brothers of Infinite Jest after those in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov.

Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (1999)

Secret Demons

Wallace battled many demons throughout his life, often simultaneously. In addition to drug abuse, alcoholism, mental illness and countless predatory relationships with his own students, it would later surface that he was also aggressively jealous of girlfriends and was once even physically abusive.

He wrote of this in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, a metafictional collection of 23 short stories centering around male chauvinism and misogynistic behavior (though it was published before the domestic abuse came to light). The stories take the form of Q and A transcript interviews of numerous anonymous men who vary in degrees of manipulation, misogyny and abuse. One even accuses women of being the root cause of men’s misbehaviors. As one of the men argues –

“Having a knee-jerk attitude to anything is a mistake, especially in the case of women, where it adds up to this very limited and condescending thing of saying they’re fragile, breakable things that can be destroyed easily. Everyone gets hurt and violated and broken sometimes. Why are women so special?”

There are stories of rape and incest. The theme of sexual violence is deeply disturbing, and Wallace addresses the lasting trauma resulting from such attacks, describing one victim – “She was terrified of everything and terrified to show it.”

Some of the men he depicted may have served as a mirror, a self-consciousness that can be read as an admission of his own transgressions.

The Pale King (2011)

Boredom and Meaning

Wallace began his research for The Pale King soon after Infinite Jest was published. He studied the history and etymology of the word boredom then took accounting classes and studied tax publications.

The novel centers on a group of IRS agents in Peoria, Illinois in the 1980s. Fogle narrates his life and childhood and how he joined the IRS to follow in his father’s footsteps. He is dedicated and meticulous with a profound interest in laws and tax codes. Rand is the opposite – a rebellious and unconventional female agent who refuses to conform to societal expectations. Lane falls somewhere in between. Insecure and inexperienced, he struggles with such menial and tedious tasks. But they all share the same conflicts of balancing their work, life and mental well-being.

Here, Wallace uses boredom as an existential condition as his characters search for meaning in the monotony of their everyday lives. He worked on the story for over a decade. His drafts contained more than 1,000 pages and 150 chapters. Struggling to finish it, he suspected his antidepressants were numbing both his emotions and his mind. In 2007, he went off Nardil in the hopes of writing more clearly. In little over a year, as he continued working on the novel, he lost 30kg, tried and failed other treatments, and succumbed to while hiding his severe depression.

He ended his life on September 12, 2008. After writing a tender two-page letter to his wife, he hanged himself from their porch ceiling.

He left the lamp on over his desk – underneath were the neatly typed and stacked pages of the manuscript for The Pale King.