W/R/T DFW, The Meaning of Life, et al.

A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays
by David Foster Wallace
1997, Little, Brown


I have always had a somewhat uncomfortable relationship with post-modern literature. On the one hand, I admire its ability to extract from the genre a sensibility that expands the notions of what narrative ought and ought not to be, its audacity in discarding stale, traditional methods of developing character or conflict. On the other hand, the quirks that help to define the movement - excessive list-making, large depositories of arcane trivia, meta-narrativity - become cloying over the long form of a novel.

Perhaps the epitome of the long form post-modern novel is David Foster Wallace's 1,079 page opus Infinite Jest, a book often cited as one of the most astounding works of modern literature (Time magazine named it one of the hundred greatest works of literature from 1923 on).

As anyone who knows me is well aware, I have a borderline pathological need to throw my conversational weight around on the topic of most any musician, artist, writer, filmmaker "considered" to be anything at all. As such, the first time I attempted to read Infinite Jest was my freshman year of college.

I checked out the heavy tome and lugged it back to my dorm room where it sat, staring me down with each of its one thousand-plus pages, on my bookshelf through not one but two renewals through the library. After the nine weeks had elapsed, I lugged the thing back to the library and returned it unread.

I have since checked the book out twice more and the closest I have ever come to actually reading the damn thing was in perusing a small portion appearing to take place in a Massachusetts halfway home for drug addicts at my cousin's apartment in Shrewsbury.

Recently I was at a used book sale (a clause that prompts most of the stories that come from my mouth), and stumbled across a copy of Wallace's nonfiction collection A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (a title that, perhaps subconsciously, is indebted to the 1960s musical A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum) and, guilt-ridden over my failure to ever successfully delve into Infinite Jest, I bought it and brought it home.

Over the course of the last few months, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again has been virtually a companion to me, accompanying me on every car ride, detention duty, camping trip and check-up since I began reading it in August. This collection of work has taken me a long time to read, true, but this is in part due to my preference to juggle reading material (as long as I avoid conflicting genres).

Mostly, though, it is due to an overwhelming desire to never want to leave DFW's head, for A Supposedly Fun Thing... is one of the most delightfully engaging, endlessly variable, intoxicatingly awe-inducing works of nonfiction I've read.

I worry about my ability to write about this book because the depth of my admiration for DFW after reading this collection perhaps interferes with my ability to write sanely. During the few months I read this book I will readily admit to crying - not slow-trickle-tears, but full on crying jags - at least twice not at anything in particular written in one of DFW's essays, but at my inconsolable sadness that because of his suicide, the world has been deprived of what might be one of the most brilliant thinkers I've ever read.

I read this book start to finish, but I didn't start at the beginning or end at the finish. The first essay in the collection I read was the one that perhaps initially grabbed my interest: a sixty-something page essay on the films of David Lynch.

David Lynch is one of my favorite filmmakers: a brilliant, unruly artist who makes infuriating and often incoherent films about the dark underbelly of American society and, perhaps, human nature. DFW was sent to the set of Lost Highway, one of Lynch's deliriously disturbing works. There he wrote about Lynch's filming but the larger essay spins out to include some analysis of Lynch's work and speculation on what it means to be outside the Hollywood mainstream. Consider this excerpt, in which DFW ingeniously, clumsily, describes the allure of film:

Movies are an authoritarian medium, They vulnerabilize you and then dominate you. Part of the magic of going to a movie is surrendering to it, letting it dominate you. The sitting in the dark, the looking up, the tranced distance from the screen, the being able to see the people on the screen without being seen by the people on the screen, the people on the screen being so much bigger than you, prettier than you, more compelling than you, etc...

Commercial film doesn't seem like it cares very much about an audience's instruction or enlightenment. Commercial film's goal is to "entertain," which usually means enabling various fantasies that allow the moviegoer to pretend he's somebody else and that life is somehow bigger and more coherent and more compelling and attractive and in general just more entertaining than a moviegoer's life really is.

DFW goes on to comment that part of the agenda of art film in the last fifty years has been to disabuse moviegoers of this basic seduction (think of the French new wave and its Brechtian techniques). Lynch's films, he argues, fall into neither category: they are not entertainment (though I would suggest they are certainly seductive) but nor are challenging or enlightening. They really just... are. DFW's ultimate point is that Lynch's films are so haunting because we have none of our usual defenses to bring to his films. Because we don't know what they want from us, we cannot respond, sincerely or cynically, to its requests.

Before I slide into a tangent on the power of Lynch's work and DFW's brilliant observations regarding it, I'll force myself to move on. But at the conclusion of this essay (which was initially printed in Premiere magazine) I had already fallen halfway in love with DFW. He took a filmmaker I loved, had spent mental energy on, and he gave me new perspective on what, perhaps, makes his work so inexplicable, so occult.

The essays in this collection range in style from tongue-in-cheek academia ("Existentiovoyeuristic conundra notwithstanding...") to over-caffeinated observer mode. Listen to the way he describes a fairground attraction:

I have a particular longstanding fear of things that spin independently inside a larger spin. I can barely even watch this. The Zipper is the color of unbrushed teeth, with big scabs of rust... One long scream, wobbled by Doppler, is coming from Native Companion's cage, which is going around and around on its hinges while a shape inside tumbles like stuff in a dryer. My particular neurological makeup (extremely sensitive: carsick, airsick, heightsick; my sister likes to say I'm "lifesick") makes even just watching this an act of enormous personal courage.

How can you not read that and feel thrilled? The interplay between archly high language and slangily low is exhilarating. His subtle self-deprecation essentially enables the feat of allowing his reader (this one, anyway) to transfer any and all emotions onto him (this feat similarly evident in Sarah Vowell's work). DFW seems like the best friend I never had.

Some of the delighftul recurring trends in the work include excessive abbreviation. DFW never writes "approximately" when "approx." suffices to service his meaning. "With respect to" becomes "w/r/t", etc. This hastening of communication just emphasizes the feeling that you are sitting at Denny's with the most brilliant person you ever met scribbling his ideas about irony and television in postmodern literature on his placemat in crayon as he gesticulates at you with a lit cigarette.

In other words, the persona of DFW is (I think unintentionally) part of the subject of this work. Whether he writes about tennis, Jacques Derrida or cruise ships, the through-line is DFW himself. You want to be with him while he experiences the world with eyes sharper than yours. He seems, much like the giant-headed movie stars of Hollywood he describes: smarter and more exciting and more brilliant than you. His life seems romanticised, in part because of his explicit acknowledgement that his life is just the opposite.

For lurking equally everywhere in this work, constantly counterbalancing his excitement, his engagement with life, his curiosity about the world, is his overwhelming sadness and depression.

In his essay on cruise ships (that link leads to its abridged form as it appeared in Harper's), from which this collection takes its title, DFW writes about the experience of being pampered by strangers and surrounded by tourists. In this environment designed to numb with luxury whatever troubles you have, to stimulate the pleasure receptors in your brain, DFW feels paradoxically desperate and insignificant:

There is something about a mass-market Luxury Cruise that's unbearably sad. Like most unbearably sad things, it seems incredibly elusive and complex in its causes and simple in its effect: on board the Nadir - especially at night, when all the ship's structured fun and reassurances and gaiety-noise ceased - I felt despair. The word's overused and banalified now, despair, but it's a serious word, and I'm using it seriously. For me it denotes a simple admixture - a weird yearning for death combined with a crushing sense of my own smallness and futility that presents as a fear of death. It's maybe close to what people call dread or angst. But it's not these things, quite. It's more like wanting to die in order to escape the unbearable feeling of becoming aware that I'm small and weak and selfish and going without any doubt at all to die. It's wanting to jump overboard.

Let that sit with you for a minute.

As I alluded earlier, DFW committed suicide in 2008 after a long bout with depression. This, of course, infuses this passage with "unbearable sadness" in retrospect. But reading this passage stirs in my mind both sadness and excitement. The excitement is in the feeling of privilege DFW grants with such brutal self-reflection.

This experience of steeping oneself in another person's world is why I love literature, art, music, film. It is comforting to know that DFW existed, that I am not alone in trying to blindly make my way through life.

I know that this entry has been disorganized and confusing, but my overwhelming adoration of this book interferes a bit with my thoughts.

I am left with the feeling that this is what literature is for. DFW's writing is the perfect expression of a man discontent to let life happen to him. I love this book because it excites the best parts of me, the parts that are equally involved in the world around me.

DFW demonstrates how wonderfully exhilarating it is to engage with life: to not take for granted how odd the world is, to be excited by ideas, by experiences, to be mystified by the mundane, to be charged with emotion during quiet moments when the fabric of the world (a carnival, a cruise ship, a tennis match) is pulled back to reveal sensitive, naked flesh (despair, excitement, hopefulness).

This book is as much about how horrifying and stimulating and wonderful life is as it is about how cruise ships work or what David Lynch's films mean. It's about how beautiful and weird and sad and perplexing this fucked-up world is.

To read this book is to bathe in it. It is to wrap yourself up in the knowledge that you're not alone in life, not alone in worrying what to make of it, in being afraid to use it the wrong way or waste it focusing on the wrong things, in wanting desperately not to take it for granted, in desiring connection with other people.

It is in this connection that life makes sense to me. The experience of sharing your life with another, sharing theirs. The experience of being excited by details, turned on by ideas. It is the reason I love, the reason I read. It is nourishing in the ways only the best things are.

A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again is the sort of book that charges me and David Foster Wallace the sort of writer who makes me grateful to be alive, even if it makes me all the more incredibly fucking sad that he's not.