Synecdoche, DFW
this was written in response to The Last Essay I Need to Write about David Foster Wallace by Mary K. Holland, published on Literary Hub on Nov. 29, 2021: the editors at Lit Hub chose not to run it
a sinner knows more about virtue than a saint knows about vice
Whatever happened to not speaking ill of the dead?
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“What’s any artist but the dregs of his work? The human shambles that follows it around. What’s left of the man when the work’s done but a shambles of apology?” (another dead white American male author in his debut novel)
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“What does it mean that this artist could not produce in his life the mutually respecting empathy he all but preached in his work (or, most clearly, in his statements about it)?”
I cannot get over this question. Does the author have insight into the Great Book of Life of One David Foster Wallace penned by Saint Peter to draw this conclusion? It is a ridiculous charge to level at anyone, saying that because you have seen them at their worst, they could not have possibly ever produced mutually respecting empathy in their entire life.
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Here he comes, the white male, to defend his red-pill author. I’m ethnic white, thank you very much, and I’m pretty sure at least some of the pills the author in question consumed in his life were also of the sanguine variety. (English is not my first language, I went and looked up synonyms for red in the thesaurus.)
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Do you hate me yet?
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Is the author saying that because we have testimony to the effect that Wallace’s books did not make him a good person, they could not possibly make their readers good people and could presumably even make them worse?
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Is the author saying that men who hate women enjoy Wallace’s work in particular? The author cannot possibly be saying that, can she?
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The author is saying that Americans have been deceived into enjoying Wallace’s work by a manufactured aura of saintliness.
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The author is saying that Wallace physically attacked women because we have an account of a coffee table being thrown in the direction of Mary Karr during an argument. Are all people who destroy or attempt to destroy an object by throwing it in the direction of another person during an emotional breakdown guilty of assault? I’m sorry, I don’t want to make light of this, but there are literally laws that make it more understandable to murder someone when strong emotions are involved. Are those misogynistic laws? Yes. Yes, they actually are, but I just want to point out that our rape-culture has been lenient towards murderers out of jealousy for ages now. We have progressed, we have evolved; but when the coffee table incident happened, we were still deep in the dark ages of nineties drama, when Glenn Close and Demi Moore exploited the hapless Michael Douglas’s (married, kids, can’t keep it in nonetheless) dick. Those were different times.
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Does anyone understand this? Managing the trauma of reality is not possible without first addressing said reality. Historical amnesia, the mandated choice of cultural oblivion, makes a lot of people look like fools all the damn time.
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Edward Said invented contrapuntal reading for this very reason. By judging the works of art from the past by the standards of today, you cannot help but look like a fool to someone who already agrees with your standards, and it is extremely unlikely that such an approach will convince anyone who does not. How was Jane Austen supposed to know that a hundred years later someone will take great exception to her casually mentioning that a character in her novel lived off the income from the colonies. If she went on a diatribe against the exploitative nature of the world she inhabited, would we today even know who Jane Austen was? (No. No, we most certainly would not.)
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But the problem with Wallace is that he preached mutually respecting empathy in his work, while being an absolute grade-A asshole in his real life. Right? Have you actually read any of his work? He displays, as an author, a respecting empathy towards some of the most deranged characters in the entire republic of letters (okay, let’s not go overboard, the entire mainstream republic of letters). Considering that many of these characters commit, or at least contemplate, suicide, could it possibly mean that his statements about his work, which everyone has decided they mean a saintly plea to extend empathy to everyone, are actually a pretty plain statement to the effect: I am a real mean freak, please, do not despise me.
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A real mean freak. Now here’s the question; were the American nineties populated by so many real mean freaks by a historical coincidence, or was there an entire industry of popular culture erected to make everybody feel that way? Kurt Cobain was a real mean freak. Billy Corgan. Trent Reznor. Damn near the entire MTV was just real mean freaks raging about their strange emotions. Careers were made by tapping into the angst of the young white male who felt like a real mean freak and was worried there was no space for him and the way he felt in this world. Where was the diversity, where were the women (Alanis Morissette was a real mean freak too, and anyone who listened to the end of Jagged Little Pill knows it), black folks (Ice T, damn straight), where were the LGBTQ voices, the immigrants, where was everyone who felt alienated for systemic and actual reasons and not “just” the emotional reasons conjured up with some really dark magic straight from the corpse of Cobain? Just something to think about (Sinead O’Connor was dead right about the Catholic Church and look what happened to her … if she had only used her wicked vibes on something intangible, she could have become the superstar she always deserved to be). Those were different times.
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And so to say that men who hate women enjoy Wallace’s work in particular is to my mind indefensibly hurtful. Does Wallace’s writing reproduce the misogyny inherent in the author’s life and culture? Undoubtedly. Is this done intentionally, with the express purpose of compromising the reader? I am not sure how to prove that it is not, but I will try. Does his fiction also do other things that we still find worthwhile in our present day? From my perspective: yes. A resounding yes, actually, I freaking love the way he makes fiction, and consider it incredible by any standard of the craft.
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Just another quick aside, before I go back to defending my saintly author. Why was it exactly Junot Diaz who got taken down so effortlessly? Was it just the timing, the height of the #metoo movement? Was there really no sleaze among contemporary white male writers? Lorin Stein had to go a bit later, but he was “just” an editor, “just” a translator, not a genius, not a real talent. Could it be that the Dominicans were simply not strong enough, culturally, economically, to defend him at that crucial time? Is that a weird question to ask? Maybe the reason Wallace gets it is because it is impossible to impeach a live WASP talent (a well proven fact), so the fury at the state of things gets taken out on the dead one? If this is so, then maybe I can kind of dig it, and on some level of his self-comprehension I think Wallace would dig it too (and on many, many other levels I think he would not).
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Incidentally, I have been spending some time lately in the company of one Franz Biberkopf from Döblin’s Berlin, Alexanderplatz. At the beginning of the novel, Franz has just gotten out of prison after serving five years for assaulting and killing his girlfriend. Not knowing what to do, he soon returns to the apartment where they lived, finds her sister there, and casually rapes her before moving on. The act is not graphically depicted and is told through his awareness; him being a seriously damaged, disoriented, dim-witted brute.
Would a man who hates women find some enjoyment in this scene? Well, I suspect that he would. Would I accuse Döblin of gratifying misogynists? No, I would not. Why? This is difficult. The author has “faithfully” represented a slice of Weimar reality in the nineteen twenties; if an accurate representation of a particular reality is gratifying to people who feel comfortable in that reality, well, what options do we even have to withhold them their pleasure? We can either pretend that this specific reality was different from what it was, or we can choose to ignore any reality that does not meet our standards and consign the majority of the human experience so far to historical oblivion in order to faster approach the desired ideal state of things.
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Now imagine for a moment that your desired ideal state of things would not get consigned to oblivion in a matter of years, and laugh at your own vanity. The standards would naturally evolve and your experience would be forgotten. All you wanted was to make things better, to hold reality to a higher standard. And now polite society completely ignores your prehistorical conceptions of how things could be better; saying that what you actually did in their new way of seeing things is at odds with what you were saying. And they keep the ball rolling for maybe another year or so, but soon, from oblivion, the same old patterns and stories and injustices emerge, and there is no one around to keep score.
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If the simple point of contention here is that Wallace being so widely read produces insufferable men, then I can say from personal experience that sorry, with all due respect to DFW, but I was a dick entirely on my own. Seeing parts of myself mirrored in a replica of a hideous man did not make me purr with pleasure at the recognition, it was more of a shock: “Jesus, man, when you put it like that!”
So when I translated the recounted story of the girl who uses magical empathy to ward off a psychopath and published it in our students review, I honestly did not do it to say, “alright, boys, there’s this American dude here giving us license to hate women,” it was merely pure elation at how hard the guy goes at his sentences, how wonderfully the story is structured, and how gloriously fucked up the story actually is.
I read Infinite Jest and The Pale King and Consider the Lobster (I find the title essay by far the weakest of the bunch; note also how celebrated his extending empathy to the lobster is, and how no one mentions at least some empathy was extended also to Las Vegas porn stars) and that single story from Brief Interviews with Hideous Men before I learned of his actual attitudes toward women and had enough. It was not until the lockdowns that I read Oblivion and my admiration for him was reignited.
Honestly, now that I think about it, his female characters really are not up to standard (Franzen, for a male writer from a similar milieu, easily takes the cake here) and his entire body of work is dominated by the male narrative voice. This lack of fully fleshed out female characters and their stories must be a black mark on Wallace’s legacy as a great writer, when we demand that our great writers faithfully render the entire breadth of the human experience in prose.
But consider what Zadie Smith says about Brief Interviews with Hideous Men: “My blind spot in my work is ‘the evil that men do.’ […] Wallace writes brilliantly about hideous men and hideous women and the hideous culture that produces them.”
I am not going to argue that the blind spot of “the evil that men do” is either as damning or as insignificant as the blind spot of “women”. But tell me, which work more faithfully reflects the culture of the nineties, the work that inadequately examines the evil that men do, or the work that treats women as little more than convenient foils for the extrapolations and self-justifications of the male psyche? Both seem to me as quite the accurate representations of that particular culture. And yet the culture has moved on.
In the twenty-twenties, we no longer completely ignore the evil that men do, and we problematize both the Wallaceian cult of personality and his weirdly male-centric fiction. But to claim that we are advancing the culture even further by consigning Wallace’s works to historical oblivion is to make a serious error of judgment. The culture has moved on also because of his work and not in spite of it.
Men who “think [their] pseudo-feminism allows [them] to enlighten [women] about [their] own experiences of male oppression and sexual violation” exist despite Wallace, not because of him. They will be around whether Wallace is still being read or not, and while it is possible that some of them will gain some rhetorical flair and a deviously underhanded metaphor or two for having read him, it is equally possible that some of them will dislike the image they glimpse in the mirror of his prose and tone down their culturally learned sexism.
In any case, women also gain a faithful representation of what they are up against that they can examine in the privacy of their minds. The books cannot hurt you and Wallace is dead. Being fed up with the pseudo-feminist mansplainers …
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Am I mansplaining? This is only if what I am saying is obvious to everyone, right? There is something predatory about constructing a persuasive argument in any case.
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Being fed up with the pseudo-feminist mansplainers is a perfectly legitimate argument for not wanting to read Wallace’s work, and anyone who tries to convince you otherwise is wrong. In a culture already on high alert against all manner of pick-up artists, red-pillers, predators, and sadists, you probably do not need insight into the extreme reaches of the disturbed male psyche to stay on guard against all the shit men routinely try to pull without consequence.
In my opinion, though, his fiction offers much more than that, as I think he is a ridiculously talented writer on many levels who is truly in a league of his own in terms of the distance he travels with every thought and the defamiliarization that results from this. There is no alternative to some of his works in the world of fiction, so consumer choice really does not apply here: you cannot say, oh, I do not like that this man was abusive, and I will shop for a similar product elsewhere. There is no similar product on the market.
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If the lore is true, Wallace was a drunk and a drug addict who entered rehab in his thirties and went through the 12-step AA program. He suffered from a lifelong depression, went for electric shocks when the pills stopped working, and then hanged himself at 46. Given the way he treated himself in real life, it is not surprising that he hurt others along the way.
Wallace, however, had been dead eight years when a self-proclaimed pussy-grabber and connoisseur of porn stars was elected to the highest office in the land. He was dead a decade when a future Supreme Court Justice responded to accusations that he had instigated a gang rape of a girl in college by saying: “I like beer.” And he will still be dead whether American women retain their right to abortion or not (I am watching the current developments around Roe v. Wade with horror; if American men, the number one cause of unwanted pregnancies, are content to let women fight for their rights on their own, the stain on their honor will be impossible to erase).
I was not warned that things like this were actually possible in American culture in any of the other novels of the nineties and the aughts that the industry showed me at the time. It was Wallace who was tasked with taking a good hard look at himself and his culture and bring us the news.
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I have just now read Rebecca Hazelton’s The Man: A Compilation (funny how the Twitter algorithms seem to live rent-free in my head, and by funny I mean disturbing, and by rent-free I mean I am definitely paying for it somehow) and if it were not for the Louis CK call out that made the timeline impossible, I was just about ready to throw this whole essay in the trash. Good riddance, you God damn creep.
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Hazelton makes the instantly recognizable author stand in for the whole, which is what I wanted to argue against in this essay. The strategy is effective, and hardly seems any more duplicitous than taking an incident from your life when you were hurtful to another person and making it into a thing from which you actually suffered the most.
Does it really work, though? The poem preempts some of my arguments, but by blurring the lines between biography and society, it makes it easier for me, once the initial shock has worn off, to save my beloved author from the most egregious accusations. Surely the worst parts of The Man are about someone else, surely the misattribution is justified given the obvious intent of the poem, and therefore the hyperbole is intentional given the obvious intent of the poem, surely the sarcasm is a bit too dark, too pointed to completely dismantle the mitigating circumstance of his suffering, and surely now that we all know how ridiculous the attempts to canonize this man are, he deserves a dose of being dragged through the mud and vilified in equal measure, and yet surely just as unjustly.
I don’t know.
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When Franz Biberkopf, after a period of personal growth, tries to stop his friend from seducing women and letting them go after a week or two (“he is not a bad guy, he is my friend, and I will not let you slander him, but what he is doing is animal cruelty, actual skinning” “you have to take pity on the women, they’re human beings after all, just like us, just like him”), the friend throws him out of a car, in front of another car, and Franz loses his arm.
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What I do know, and what the poem makes clear, is that Wallace was definitely not the only man who, sitting pretty in a culturally designated zone of authority, preyed on, humiliated, and belittled women. Yet he was, as far as I can tell, the only man at the time who was at least bothered enough about it to address his culpability in his work; and even if the first step taken toward reckoning is not nearly enough – is in fact pathetic, when viewed from a distance – it does not seem fair to focus on the first step further down the road and use it as the incriminating piece of evidence, while letting all the others who did exactly the same things but at least had the good sense not to try to extricate themselves from their guilt in writing, off the hook.
Without Wallace, what would the first step from the male side even look like? Who else would be naively self-absorbed enough to think they could easily write their way out of assault, public harassment of a student, wanton disregard of an entire gender? I mean, the warm embrace of the patriarchy can easily protect you from the consequences of all these things, but not if you run your mouth off about them. Running your mouth turns reality into words, and words create the space that is not there in reality, until somehow, over time, it is.
And if he is now to be cast as the lynchpin of the whole misogynistic rot in the very conversation he helped create, because his actions in real life were more in line with his own culture than the ideals proclaimed in one of his speeches, ideals for which he nonetheless provided direction, and which in fact seem more tangible today than they did in his time, is to send a powerful signal never, ever to examine the darker aspects of yourself and your life in public, because at some point, inevitably, the lights or the climate or the temperature will change and all your shadows will get burnt into stone.
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The food you eat has caused some degree of human suffering somewhere along the way to your mouth, either during the planting, the harvest, the transport, or the sale, not to mention the suffering caused if you eat meat. The clothes you wear have caused suffering. The people who suffer to serve your needs have also caused suffering to others. Your bus driver has a violent past. Your hairdresser beats her children. Your dentist pays in crypto for illegal porn, your mailman tortures animals, the lady who helps you with your taxes peppers her husband’s dinners with strychnine, and all the companies you rely on in your daily life cause mass death every quarter as a normal part of their operations.
And you don’t really care. You say you do, but what you really care about is convenience. If your bus driver was Franz Biberkopf and he looked at you as you were getting on and said, “you know, I killed a girl with a spatula once, a long time ago,” you would probably turn around and get off, right? Unless, and let’s be honest here, you were in a real hurry for something very important.
Then it is amazing how many justifications you would come up with in an instant to convince yourself that the history and personality of your bus driver are actually none of your business. You would perhaps fire off an outraged tweet or resolve to contact the bus company about one of its drivers, in the very act of relying on the convenience offered to you by the offending party.
And if the ensuing tweetstorm then somehow went against you (“Franz paid his dues!” “This is ableism, you just don’t want a one-armed driver!” “Franz is a real sweetheart and he didn’t really mean to kill her!” “Who are you to judge!”) and the company decided to do nothing about it, and if, for instance, Franz Biberkopf drove the express line and Prince Myshkin drove the local line, as hurt and furious as you would understandably be about the whole thing, you would still feel like an idiot whenever your principles added ten minutes to your commute.
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To the library, Franz, and step on it, I’m starving!
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The patty in your burger is the minced flesh of a being unique in the entire known universe. You could have satisfied your hunger in other ways, but the burger is not only convenient for you at the time, it also tastes good. The being was murdered for your convenience and for your pleasure (and since you paid for it, we are actually talking about a contract killing). There are even times when the burger is not the most convenient option for you, but you desire it anyway, so you go out of your way to procure the murdered animal. Your pleasure overrides even convenience, while moral considerations have at no point entered the space of your awareness.
So why must the artist be blameless to offer you pleasure, when you are not as you offer it to yourself? Why must he be as blameless as the creature you have dragged onto your plate before you would allow him to offer you knowledge, reflection, beauty, despair, hope, terror, the pleasing form of the sentence, the line, the plane, the attractive constellation of color, the glimpse of a certain reality like and unlike your own? When have we decided that the service the artist offers us is primarily his personal life? When have we decided that it is okay to objectify the artist and judge his life simply because he has offered us the opportunity to judge the aesthetic, rational, moral choices of his expression? When have we decided that our culture is best served exclusively by the artistic expression of saints? None of us are saints, so what can we possibly hope to gain from the art of people who, by definition, can have no real clue about what they are talking about?
All difficult questions. Will they need to be any less considered, discussed, and hopefully perhaps resolved to the broadest possible agreement if, a decade from now (one can dream), a dark truth comes to light about the person who asked them?
(After I paid for their killing, I eat beings unique in the entire universe solely for my personal pleasure; and I even run my mouth off about it to … relativize toxic masculinity? Ecce homo horribilis.)
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Since David Foster Wallace, given his present state of aliveness, can no longer be inconvenienced, this might actually be the perfect cultural moment to prioritize the convenience of women to not be harassed, assaulted, abused, neglected, and taken advantage of by men over the convenience of men to harass, assault, abuse, neglect, and take advantage of women also at the expense of his reputation.
Then let us make it finally and conclusively known that no amount of artistic genius gives a person license to treat another person worse than they themselves would want to be treated, and that no amount of artistic genius will save your livelihood and the respect of your peers if you do.
The books can offer no excuse or apology for Wallace’s behavior, so in order to seize this cultural moment, I invite all persons who do not participate in the ritualistic degradations of people and call out such behavior whenever they see it, all persons who would never mandate or leverage consent for any type of empowerment, all persons to whom basic decency and respect come naturally and who expect nothing but basic decency and respect in return, all persons who agree that human relationships and emotions are always a work in progress for each individual and for society as a whole, and that it is nevertheless not impossible to bring the individual nature of emotional experience to a shared truth, that subjectivity does not exclude that there is right and wrong, that there are also degrees of right and wrong, and that it is not always right to make a wrong your business, but that sometimes it is very right, and that it is not always easy to tell the difference, so we must be mindful and always meet each other first in good faith, and I invite all such persons who own a copy of a book by David Foster Wallace that they have acquired in good faith, and either found or intend to find some measure of comfort in the book for reasons other than his tarnished reputation, to go to your bookshelf and take the book in your hand and turn it around and put it back on your bookshelf with its spine facing the wall.
