Understanding Why David Foster Wallace Does Not Move Me

I should say David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest does not move me. Until today, I thought this was a fault of my taste, or my education, or intelligence, or some combination of the above. Once upon a time, I went with a cousin to see Rush at the long-gone Market Square Arena. He ooohed and ahhed at the laser displays, and I was bored. I had seen Bruce Springsteen previously, within a month or so, without lasers and with the lights up, get me and the rest of the audience up on our feet. Infinite Jest left me feeling like that Rush concert - technical wizardry that was impressive but irrelevant to my soul.

Now, having read Samuel Liu's David Foster Wallace: Genius?, I understand better why Infinite Jest felt like a chore rather than a transcendental experience. 

This might explain what a recall as a soured feeling after finished Wallace's novel:

But the problem is that he’s getting away with intellectual larceny, flashing heavy texts that people haven’t read, like how he uses difficult academic language, supposedly to parody it, but really to make his language original and intelligent-sounding. With the great bursts of speed of Infinite Jest, he manages to out-talk us, out-think us with such rapidity that we are so afraid of him that we don’t feel confident enough to question him.

He is smart by intimidation.

Wherein, then, lies Wallace’s power? For he absolutely is a powerful writer. Many people my age immediately recognized Wallace’s voice as their own. He has made people feel less lonely, he has been a hero.

I did not belong to Wallace's generation, but I did not think I was that far from him, either. But if any writer ever intimidated me, it would be William Faulkner or James Joyce or Virginia Woolf or Joyce Carol Oates. Hemingway can intimidate from his extracurricular activities, but I would not take intimidation from him. Those writers who might intimidate me are those who make me feel. Then, too, I know about being a bullshitter, and how a bullshitter operates, and I am skeptical of those who try to out-talk me.

But the clincher was here:

This is, in fact, Wallace’s point. But for the sake of his theoretical point and the cool sterility of the tone suggesting mental breakdown, he trades away the feeling of actually being present in the book. We are unable to enter the character’s world, even as we’re constantly listening to them. Wallace has traded depicting a real world for pure text. Lenore in Broom of the System suspects she’s made of pure language; one often feels this with Wallace’s characters, that they are described a lot, and extremely memorable, but never seem to animate in our minds. They are described, but they don’t exist.

That’s to say, we all know a Depressed Person, we can recognize her in real life, and in ourselves. But can we say how she would react to some other character, in a nuanced way?

The problem with Wallace’s monologuing characters is that they appear on their own stage. But think of the difference between Wallacian characters and those of Jonathan Franzen: don’t Franzen’s characters feel more nuanced, subtle, as if we had experienced our lives through them?

I am not a genius. What talent I had for words was never up to the level of Wallace. These things I know. But I have tried hard for my characters not to sound like me, or like one another. That I thought was the point of having more than one character. His characters never felt real to me. I read The Brothers Karamazov, and for all the strangeness of their world, they feel like real people.

So much for Infinite Jest, Mr. Liu also explained why it was I feel head over heels with Marcel Proust. KH giggles whenever I mention Proust. I am a Hoosier from a factory town, as far removed from Proust's Paris as I might be from Frank Herbert's Arrakis. But Proust moves me. I studied his sentences, they have a rhythm, an energy that transmutes emotion.

What Mr. Liu wrote that let me better able my attraction to Proust was this:

Meanwhile, Proust, that most cultured of writers, felt very natural to me, because, firstly, Proust’s ideas translated to me regardless of cultural differences. But more importantly, Proust was always reacting like a child to his cultural obsessions—he was trying to understand them. His details, too, tend to be strung along a series of metaphors and similes, so that I can understand what underlying shape is being described, even if I don’t know the object in particular. He also supplies the adjective, telling us his attitude, how to feel about it, “sweet and past-haunted furniture,” for example. Flaubert makes fun of a doctor for having a bust of Hippocrates in his room, since how stupid and cliché it would be for a doctor to do this! But when I read this in high school, never having been to an art museum, and with no understanding of the classics, I always wondered: But who is Hippocrates, and what is a bust?

I have always felt that Proust was the best teacher I ever had. Proust’s philosophical motor is “trying to figure it out.” Everything relies on nuance. He generalizes extremely carefully. If Wallace merely refers to culture as if we already share that culture and understand it, Proust comes, in short, like an immigrant in his own mind, trying to figure out his own world. And when we follow that track, we feel like we are learning while Proust is learning.

Thank you, Mr. Liu.

 sch 3/17