‘To be a fucking human being’
Adam S. Miller, The Gospel According to David Foster Wallace: Boredom and Addiction in an Age of Distraction
Bloomsbury, 136pp, £16.99, ISBN 9781474236973
reviewed by Elsa Court
Adam S. Miller’s The Gospel According to David Foster Wallace: Boredom and Addiction in an Age of Distraction is the first book to address religious language and ideas within the work of one of the most celebrated of America’s contemporary novelists. If the book has one precedent, a chapter dedicated to Wallace in Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly’s All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age (2011), it makes a strong case against it. Taking issue with Dreyfus and Kelly’s overall assumption that Wallace was symptomatic of the nihilism of a faith-deprived era in Western civilisation, Miller argues that the author of Infinite Jest (1996) was, rather, deeply invested in the mechanics of worship involved in our mundane experience of living and working – making a daring claim that for Wallace there is a life-affirming force which is encountered at the very moment idols disappoint.
Like Dreyfus and Kelly’s book, Miller’s Gospel is thorough but it invites a general, not exclusively academic readership. A Mormon philosopher and Scripture theologian, Miller has published several well-received paraphrases of biblical texts – Ecclesiastes, Paul’s letter to the Romans – which were primarily aimed at a Mormon audience. The tendency towards hagiography which has followed Wallace’s suicide in 2008 has not escaped Miller’s notice in his understanding of the current state of Wallace reception in literary criticism and broader American culture. Though this provides a convenient starting point for Miller to address Wallace’s awareness of religious thinking, he insists, from a set of introductory remarks in the book’s first chapter, that he is not interested in either promoting or challenging the vision of David Foster Wallace as ‘some brand of postmodern saint’ which has somewhat problematically arisen in the years following his death. Still, addressing such questions from the very start, and having titled his book The Gospel According to David Foster Wallace, Miller signposts his awareness of Wallace’s critical place within contemporary American culture and within the culture of secular individualism and mass-distraction that Wallace so precisely represented.
Miller’s book sticks to an interpretation of the religious beyond denominations of faith, identifying, mainly, the tendency to charge objects of distraction with the hope of satisfaction, thereby turning them into ‘idols’ of worship. This urge to worship, which Miller notes is universally doomed to disappoint, is presented as a human trait beyond the choice of affiliation to a particular church or cult, and here the book demonstrates an intention to address religious and non-religious readers alike. Its core argument is valid for either category: that the longing for transcendence is as inescapable as its outcome, namely, the return to immanence. Miller writes: ‘If you worship (and you do) [the] moment [of return to immanence] will come. This homecoming will hurt a bit. It will feel like failure.’ This process is meaningful, because according to Miller’s reading of Wallace, it is in this moment of homecoming to immanence that the tangible realness of human experience may be apprehended.
In spite of this universalising approach to faith and disappointment, which may take such varied forms as all-consuming professional ambition, lust, addiction to entertainment or recreational drugs, or indeed actual religious worship, one of the book’s main theses about the theology of Wallace could be said to echo Mormon thought. Wallace’s promotion of a reconciliation between body and mind, between the mundane, ordinary experience and the ideal created in the mind, is the main line of argument which Miller proposes to direct through his reading of three of Wallace’s texts: the essay ‘A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again,’ the master opus Infinite Jest and the unfinished novel on which Wallace was working at the time of his death, The Pale King. A reconciliation between the inner dynamic of the mind and the outer realities of the contingent world is at hand, Miller argues, in these three examples of Wallace’s writing. In ‘A Supposedly Fun Thing,’ Wallace embarks on a luxury cruise ship and analyses his emotional response to the experience of total comfort and passivity that has been set up for him. In Infinite Jest, internalised dialogue-like ramblings represent the entrapment of the self and the divorce of body and mind through experiences of addiction and recovery. In The Pale King, an Inland Revenue Service employee tries to escape the drab mindlessness of his workaday predicament by occasionally shutting his eyes and imagining himself in a pleasant coastal landscape, only to see the idyllic beach become colder and more desolate at every imaginary return.
All three sources provide for Miller illustrations of the longing for transcendence from a clunky, awkward, ‘user-unfriendly’ world of bodies, all examples in which failure is the outcome. In Mormon faith, both the physical and spiritual realities are considered to be material. It is this reconciliation of body and mind on material terms which Miller’s book tries to channel through its reading of Wallace’s literary work.
Miller structures his book according to 30 key concepts taken from some of Wallace’s recurring tropes (‘books,’ ‘addiction,’ ‘beauty,’ ‘irony,’ ‘masks,’ ‘watching,’ ‘despair,’ etc.), thus constituting the author’s ‘gospel.’ In doing so, Miller presents what may look like an introduction to the author’s work, but is really a close reading of the texts in the light of his consistent thesis about contemporary culture, longing and awareness. One of Miller’s most enlightening ramifications shows that Wallace’s work uncovers the mechanics of our desire for an ‘uppercase Substance’ – in other words, our belief that there is material out there which, were it found, would enable us to achieve complete and lasting contentment. Miller’s addressing this entity as ‘uppercase Substance’ shows his engagement in uncovering not only the concepts that Wallace is playing with but also their mode of expression through language, typography, and style.
Miller points out that the twofold metaphor channelled by Wallace for representing the mind (which longs for the ‘uppercase Substance’) and the body (which, we might say, is the real, if neglected, lowercase substance) is that of the ‘map’ versus the ‘territory’; this is exemplified a third of the way into Infinite Jest, when the enactment of world battles on a set of four adjoining tennis courts brings out ontological issues about the value of maps to represent countries. Explaining this metaphor in this and other examples in Wallace’s work, Miller paraphrases some of the most challenging notions of the book in an effort to articulate what it means, to Wallace, ‘to be a fucking human being.’ Miller concedes that an inner altar-boy in him instinctively wants to ‘clean up’ Wallace’s language from the vulgar – or perhaps simply forthright – ‘fucking,’ but it is the literary critic in him who resists the impulse:
Not predominantly concerned with the wider range of Wallace criticism – as suggested by his book’s relatively short bibliography and its core content of primary texts in Wallace’s oeuvre – Miller nevertheless addresses in depth, in his afterword, the misreading of Wallace as martyr of nihilism. Objecting to what he sees as Dreyfus and Kelly’s erroneous reading of Wallace’s project, Miller shows the limitations of identifying Wallace as a postmodern Quixotic hero trying to invest the world with meaning and failing, again and again, in the face of the era’s self-generating emptiness.
Good paraphrase demands a talent with words which is only second to the accuracy of close-reading analysis: Miller’s book demonstrates an understanding not only of Wallace but of Dreyfus and Kelly’s misreading of Wallace’s ‘gospel.’ In a relatively short space this book takes up that chapter’s ultimate self-contradiction, when, turning to Wallace’s ‘Roger Federer as Religious Experience,’ they misidentify as ‘counterstrain’ the crucial spirit of awareness and gratefulness that, as Miller knows, was there all along.
Like Dreyfus and Kelly’s book, Miller’s Gospel is thorough but it invites a general, not exclusively academic readership. A Mormon philosopher and Scripture theologian, Miller has published several well-received paraphrases of biblical texts – Ecclesiastes, Paul’s letter to the Romans – which were primarily aimed at a Mormon audience. The tendency towards hagiography which has followed Wallace’s suicide in 2008 has not escaped Miller’s notice in his understanding of the current state of Wallace reception in literary criticism and broader American culture. Though this provides a convenient starting point for Miller to address Wallace’s awareness of religious thinking, he insists, from a set of introductory remarks in the book’s first chapter, that he is not interested in either promoting or challenging the vision of David Foster Wallace as ‘some brand of postmodern saint’ which has somewhat problematically arisen in the years following his death. Still, addressing such questions from the very start, and having titled his book The Gospel According to David Foster Wallace, Miller signposts his awareness of Wallace’s critical place within contemporary American culture and within the culture of secular individualism and mass-distraction that Wallace so precisely represented.
Miller’s book sticks to an interpretation of the religious beyond denominations of faith, identifying, mainly, the tendency to charge objects of distraction with the hope of satisfaction, thereby turning them into ‘idols’ of worship. This urge to worship, which Miller notes is universally doomed to disappoint, is presented as a human trait beyond the choice of affiliation to a particular church or cult, and here the book demonstrates an intention to address religious and non-religious readers alike. Its core argument is valid for either category: that the longing for transcendence is as inescapable as its outcome, namely, the return to immanence. Miller writes: ‘If you worship (and you do) [the] moment [of return to immanence] will come. This homecoming will hurt a bit. It will feel like failure.’ This process is meaningful, because according to Miller’s reading of Wallace, it is in this moment of homecoming to immanence that the tangible realness of human experience may be apprehended.
In spite of this universalising approach to faith and disappointment, which may take such varied forms as all-consuming professional ambition, lust, addiction to entertainment or recreational drugs, or indeed actual religious worship, one of the book’s main theses about the theology of Wallace could be said to echo Mormon thought. Wallace’s promotion of a reconciliation between body and mind, between the mundane, ordinary experience and the ideal created in the mind, is the main line of argument which Miller proposes to direct through his reading of three of Wallace’s texts: the essay ‘A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again,’ the master opus Infinite Jest and the unfinished novel on which Wallace was working at the time of his death, The Pale King. A reconciliation between the inner dynamic of the mind and the outer realities of the contingent world is at hand, Miller argues, in these three examples of Wallace’s writing. In ‘A Supposedly Fun Thing,’ Wallace embarks on a luxury cruise ship and analyses his emotional response to the experience of total comfort and passivity that has been set up for him. In Infinite Jest, internalised dialogue-like ramblings represent the entrapment of the self and the divorce of body and mind through experiences of addiction and recovery. In The Pale King, an Inland Revenue Service employee tries to escape the drab mindlessness of his workaday predicament by occasionally shutting his eyes and imagining himself in a pleasant coastal landscape, only to see the idyllic beach become colder and more desolate at every imaginary return.
All three sources provide for Miller illustrations of the longing for transcendence from a clunky, awkward, ‘user-unfriendly’ world of bodies, all examples in which failure is the outcome. In Mormon faith, both the physical and spiritual realities are considered to be material. It is this reconciliation of body and mind on material terms which Miller’s book tries to channel through its reading of Wallace’s literary work.
Miller structures his book according to 30 key concepts taken from some of Wallace’s recurring tropes (‘books,’ ‘addiction,’ ‘beauty,’ ‘irony,’ ‘masks,’ ‘watching,’ ‘despair,’ etc.), thus constituting the author’s ‘gospel.’ In doing so, Miller presents what may look like an introduction to the author’s work, but is really a close reading of the texts in the light of his consistent thesis about contemporary culture, longing and awareness. One of Miller’s most enlightening ramifications shows that Wallace’s work uncovers the mechanics of our desire for an ‘uppercase Substance’ – in other words, our belief that there is material out there which, were it found, would enable us to achieve complete and lasting contentment. Miller’s addressing this entity as ‘uppercase Substance’ shows his engagement in uncovering not only the concepts that Wallace is playing with but also their mode of expression through language, typography, and style.
Miller points out that the twofold metaphor channelled by Wallace for representing the mind (which longs for the ‘uppercase Substance’) and the body (which, we might say, is the real, if neglected, lowercase substance) is that of the ‘map’ versus the ‘territory’; this is exemplified a third of the way into Infinite Jest, when the enactment of world battles on a set of four adjoining tennis courts brings out ontological issues about the value of maps to represent countries. Explaining this metaphor in this and other examples in Wallace’s work, Miller paraphrases some of the most challenging notions of the book in an effort to articulate what it means, to Wallace, ‘to be a fucking human being.’ Miller concedes that an inner altar-boy in him instinctively wants to ‘clean up’ Wallace’s language from the vulgar – or perhaps simply forthright – ‘fucking,’ but it is the literary critic in him who resists the impulse:
Though bracing, “fucking” condenses much of what Wallace wants to says about the human condition. It names both the tragicomic vulgarity that colors our living and how that vulgarity is tangled up with out hunger for intimacy.
Not predominantly concerned with the wider range of Wallace criticism – as suggested by his book’s relatively short bibliography and its core content of primary texts in Wallace’s oeuvre – Miller nevertheless addresses in depth, in his afterword, the misreading of Wallace as martyr of nihilism. Objecting to what he sees as Dreyfus and Kelly’s erroneous reading of Wallace’s project, Miller shows the limitations of identifying Wallace as a postmodern Quixotic hero trying to invest the world with meaning and failing, again and again, in the face of the era’s self-generating emptiness.
Good paraphrase demands a talent with words which is only second to the accuracy of close-reading analysis: Miller’s book demonstrates an understanding not only of Wallace but of Dreyfus and Kelly’s misreading of Wallace’s ‘gospel.’ In a relatively short space this book takes up that chapter’s ultimate self-contradiction, when, turning to Wallace’s ‘Roger Federer as Religious Experience,’ they misidentify as ‘counterstrain’ the crucial spirit of awareness and gratefulness that, as Miller knows, was there all along.