Keep up the Conversation:
A Reflection on David Foster Wallace

In high school, an arty kid a year ahead of me came to school with a magazine photo stuck to his tattered white T-shirt, framed in masking tape.

“What’s on your shirt?” I asked him. I was half curious and half disdainful-like, Gosh, what weird thing are you doing now?

He looked bored with my naïveté. “Chris Farley died.”

When David Foster Wallace, essayist and fiction writer,committed suicidelast month at age 46, there were days when I wanted to wear his picture masking-taped to my professorish button-down, and I’ve been reflecting on that encounter from high school. In both situations, someone who defined a cultural moment left that moment far too soon.

Since Wallace’s death, I’ve done the grown-up equivalent of displaying his picture on a T-shirt: dropped his name whenever possible. I was close to satisfied-but not quite-with a discussion of how sad it is when any writer dies young, because all his potential is lost.

It was true, but it’s more than that.

Wallace’s death has profound implications for creative nonfiction writers and artists, especially those who are Christians. (Wallace was a genius at fiction, too, and is best known for his novel Infinite Jest, but I’m not qualified to talk about fiction, since writing it scares the bejeebers out of me.)

David Foster Wallace was one of the few creative nonfiction writers who really captured the whole postmodern messiness of today. In his introduction to The Best American Essays 2007, he wrote that fiction is scarier to write, but nonfiction is more difficult

because nonfiction’s based in reality, and today’s felt reality is overwhelmingly, circuit-blowingly huge and complex…. Both feel like they’re being executed on tightropes, over abysses…Fiction’s abyss is silence, nada, whereas nonfiction’s abyss is Total Noise, the seething static of every particular thing and experience . . . [1]

Since the day I read Wallace’s review of John Updike’s Toward the End of Time, he has been one of my cultural heroes. Wallace wasn’t afraid of discussing morality in his essays; in this particular essay, he wasn’t afraid to point out why Updike’s solipsism is so dissatisfying. Updike is particularly revolting to those under forty, he wrote, because they are “the children of all the impassioned infidelities and divorces Updike wrote about so beautifully.” This same group is afraid of the “peculiarly American loneliness: the prospect of dying without even once having loved something more than yourself.” [2]

I hadn’t found a single moral insight this brave in the approximately 135 required essays I read during my creative nonfiction MFA program. I find it strange that my teachers didn’t give us any David Foster Wallace at all among the three photocopied piles of essays they selected. Didn’t they want us to set ourselves the same challenges David Foster Wallace did? To go “treading chin-deep in post-modern waters” like a reviewer said Wallace did? [3]

The challenges he set for himself are precisely why his death has implications. His essay “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction” is a prime example of his grappling with our culture. In it, he discussed the effects of the fact that average American households watch six hours of TV daily. Somehow, he did this without passing judgment. Instead, he explored how this has changed America, and one of his observations was that this has led our culture to feel like most things are familiar, and thus, to assume a bored, ironic voice that is basically killing us.

Irony, entertaining as it is, serves an almost exclusively negative function. It’s critical and destructive, a ground-clearing. Surely this is the way our postmodern fathers saw it. But irony’s singularly unuseful when it comes to constructing anything to replace the hypocrisies it debunks…. It is unmeaty . . . I find gifted ironists sort of wickedly fun to listen to at parties, but I always walk away feeling like I’ve had several radical surgical procedures…one ends up feeling not only empty but somehow… oppressed.[4]

He was able to be hip and fun (“Actually I have never seen an average American household,” he wrote. “Except on TV.”) and also able to weave in moral observations like the one above.

To make his achievement even more impressive, he avoided some of the known pitfalls of creative nonfiction. He wasn’t a navel-gazer. You got to know him (what’s not to love about a guy who wore a tuxedo motif T-shirt to a formal dinner on a cruise and asked if he could use leftover au jus as bait for some shark watching?), but he was always talking about more than himself.

He also avoided the allure ofwriting events that were”emotionally true” butmaterially false,which has been the downfall of creative nonfiction writers like James Freyand Margaret Selzter. Perhaps this was because he was skilled at drawing truth out of ordinary moments. He could, for instance, use his actual, very detailed experiences of a seven night Caribbean cruise to comment on the attitude pampering inspires:

I want to believe that maybe this Ultimate Fantasy Vacation will be enough pampering, that this time the luxury and pleasure will be so completely and faultlessly administered that my Infantile part [the part, he explained before that "always and indiscriminately WANTS"] will be sated. [5]

Wallace always starts with what is solid and observable, showing what is true in a very specific context, which demonstrates that if truth applies in a particular context, then truth is something very solid indeed.

He broke ground for creative nonfiction writers. His experimental style blew a door wide open for authorial voice. He also provided a model for those who want to discuss truth in their work. I haven’t read anyone else who can accomplish the pat-your-head-while-rubbing-your-belly feat of creating work that is both hip and packed with moral insight. Hecreated new space for authors here, too, andI am afraid that this new space will be like a room after a party, deserted and echoey, now that Wallace is gone.

I am finding, too, that it has made me reflect, somewhat bitterly, on what his death means to those who, like me, are Christians involved in the arts. Many of us have had to block out the blare of Evangelicalism’s anti-intellectualism so we can even hear a call to become artists. And now, in order to understand our culture, we watch films with content our youth group leaders preached against and read books by authors like Wallace, who has reported on the adult entertainment awards (with characteristic moral incisiveness) and isn’t shy about referencing obscene stuff now and then. We like to look for ways in which these artworks are redemptive, and this is what The Curator is all about-finding grace even in unexpected parts of our culture.

As this art-embracing generation, we get involved and become acquainted with movers and shakers, and we even claim cultural heroes. We like to think that we’re in it together, all making the arts a place for what’s good, and beautiful, and true. But then, at moments like this, we’re caught up short by the fact that redemptive isn’t always the same as redemption. And that when treading chin-deep in the waters of post-modernism, we might experience a fatal undertow. Though we’ve found sparks of grace in these artists’ works, their own life narratives can end so tragically. I may know what to do with this theologically, but emotionally, I’m stuck, and I raise a problem for which I can offer no solution.

I do know, though, that what David Foster Wallace accomplished is bold and significant and true. And maybe now, more than ever, it is time to find our side of a conversation with him.

[1]David Foster Wallace. “Introduction: Deciderization 2007-A Special Report.” Best American Essays, 2007. Ed. David Foster Wallace. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2007), xiv.

[2]Wallace. “Certainly the End of Something or Other, One Would Sort of Have to Think.” Consider the Lobster and Other Essays. (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2006), 54.

[3]Cornel Bonca, O.C. Weekly (Orange County), review appearing in David Foster Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again. (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1997).

[4]Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing…, 67.

[5]Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing…, 316.