Bummed Out: Literature, Life, and DFW

Abstract

Drawing on the tradition of the personal essay, I’m going to try to explore and define my relationship to David Foster Wallace’s writing, how it affected me through the years, changing my perspective on life and changing the story I tell myself about my own life and my place in the world. This is by no means anything new. Personal essays have been around as long as American literature has been and examples of the use of such form for literary discussion can be found among contemporary writers — e.g. Wallace’s own essays on John Updike and Kafka (just to name a couple); Franzen’s Mr. Difficult on William Gaddis; Zadie Smith’s piece on Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. Choosing to adhere to this tradition has to do with a certain level of agreement with the idea – expressed by Michel de Montaigne – that “Every man has within himself the entire human condition.” Or, more broadly but also to the point, the choice of form is an ethical choice. This essay is going to be on myself (and my surroundings) and DFW only because these are what I can be most verbal about, the choice does not imply an avowal of some kind of superior importance attributed by myself to myself and the writer I’m most connected to. In my head we’re just examples in a personal discussion which is bound to touch larger themes than Wallace’s writing, stuff like how one relates to literature and how is a life affected when someone gives books ethical authority, or how literature can affect the individual’s relationship to the community. Literary criticism is constantly striving towards objectivity through scientific approaches, an end that might well be honorable, but that – to me, at least – ends up sounding fake and boring and meaningless a lot of the time. Not to deny that there is self-evident stuff to be found in literature, it’s just that purely analytical approaches – if nothing else – lack certain qualities, qualities that, if less scientific, have a lot to do with literature. The personal essay provides a friendly tone and a conversational approach which I think should be granted more prominence in literary criticism. The form can cure some of the defects and paradoxes currently afflicting the critical practice, its potential has to do with constructing meaning through a dialogic discussion, a principle very dear to Wallace himself. This is what I will be exploring.