Fail Again, Fail Better
Clare Hayes-Brady, The Unspeakable Failures of David Foster Wallace: Language, Identity, and Resistance
Bloomsbury, 232pp, £74.00, ISBN 9781501313523
reviewed by Stuart Walton
Scarcely any contemporary writer has passed into the literary canon more swiftly and seamlessly than David Foster Wallace. Undergraduate dissertations on him were already being written while he was still working on his posthumously published unfinished novel, The Pale King (2011). The writer himself was endlessly courted by academic journals to pronounce on anything from American literary culture to the status of political engagement in a disengaged world, while Harper's and Esquire magazines sent him on counter-intuitive journalistic assignments, purely to see what would result. News that David Foster Wallace Studies, a thriving academic industry, is already well into its 'second wave' is astonishing, given that he died less than a decade ago.
Much of the secondary literature has done little more than restate his position in American letters at the crux of a moribund postmodernism and the emergence of what has been termed the 'New Sincerity', outlining the textual strategies by which Wallace enunciated contemporary American anomie, aligning his work with currents in recent ethical and linguistic philosophy. It helped that Wallace himself, a much more cooperative interviewee than literary figures tend to present, was so voluble in discussing his own work, so that matching up his authorial pronouncements to the finished product is a more straightforward matter than it has been in the case of writers such as Philip Roth or the doggedly mute Thomas Pynchon.
Among another recent clutch of Wallace studies, Clare Hayes-Brady's book stands out as a more incisive attempt than many to get to grips with the philosophical underpinnings of Wallace's output, in both fiction and journalism. It began as academic research and, as is often the way, hasn't entirely shaken off that aura in its transition to book form, but has much to say about the stylistic and political aspects of Wallace's writing that ought to appeal to his many cult followers on both sides of the Atlantic. Hayes-Brady is a sensitive and ethically alert reader of Wallace, and she hasn't gone down the line of least resistance that others have of simply reproducing great chunks of quotation from the originals and letting them speak for themselves.
Resistance indeed, as the subtitle suggests, is one of the key themes of this study. Principally, it indicates the resistance to closure in Wallace's fiction, whereby what matters is not the final destination but the excursion itself, as well as the broken, short-circuited and comic lacunae that structure modern communication. If Wallace's work arose from the embers of postmodernist experiment, it also has less overtly acknowledged roots in the European modernism of the interwar years and the sociocultural critique of the immediate postwar period. The crisis in communication is at least as old as the Great War, but what Wallace's work recognises is that each generation finds different ways of not being able to say things to each other. In the era of saturation TV, mass culture and the internet, it may be that nobody even knows what it is they might want to say, but that in itself, as Hayes-Brady and others have shown, is no argument for giving up.
CS Lewis once said that there was no getting around the fact that we need to pay critical attention to anything to discover whether it was worth our attention in the first place, an evaluative labour that requires an intensity of mental effort for which ever fewer citizens of modern reality are equipped, or even interested in. This might be one aspect of what President Jimmy Carter was ridiculed for calling 'the modern malaise', a possibility there might be so much formal freedom in today's world that its subjects have ceased to experience themselves as free. It is not in party-political allegiance that critical awareness might be born, though, but in deep reflection on the faculty of reflection itself. 'It is not boredom that is killing for Wallace,' as Hayes-Brady puts it, 'but passivity.'
The closed circles of dedication and dependency in which the characters of Infinite Jest (1996) are caught are transparently cognate. Teenage sporting prodigies at the tennis academy are as trapped in the imperatives of their particular institutionally governed self-images as the recovering substance addicts are at the nearby halfway house, and as are the Québécois wheelchair militants mounting peripheral nocturnal and discursive assaults on a North American geopolitical hegemony. The unattainable Kafkaesque grail of the action is an elusive video referred to as 'The Entertainment', which is purported to be so immersively, fatally spellbinding that those who see it will never need to self-reflect, or to think, again.
In the context of these philosophical concerns, Hayes-Brady zeroes in on what she calls the 'troubled articulation of the relationship of self and other' in Wallace's writing, which is to say a troubled articulation of a troubled relationship. Wallace was entirely open about his consuming interest in self-help literature and the 'fake it till you make it' ideology of Twelve Steps recovery programmes, according to which if you only keep pretending that the therapeutic medicine is working, it eventually might. For the same reason, surrendering to something you don't believe in may just turn out to be transformative, and one of the ways in which one might achieve that is by enacting the outward performances of intimate relations with others, in the vague hope that, somehow, sincerity might emerge from them.
Hayes-Brady finds the limits of her patience with Wallace in this context. She doesn't like his attitude to romance, still less his versions of sexual and racial identity politics, and she seems rather shocked that there are so many dysfunctional and abusive relationships in his fiction, as though the writer's duty were to portray the world, if not as it ought to be, then at least in its potential development in that direction. Otherwise, she feels, hope itself is foreclosed, even amid conditions of the general denial of closure. Her concluding summary of Wallace's failures concludes with 'his impoverished recognition of the other.’
If there is more than academic duty to diversity in this stance – and she is right to deprecate the excruciating ritual self-abnegations Wallace stages as a privileged white male in his co-authored book on rap culture – it misses the mark because it fails in itself to see that 'the other' is precisely what has become unavailable to modern consciousness, since it was turned into an other in itself by totalising social collectivity. The best aspects of Wallace's writing lie in their reflection of radical self-estrangement, metaphors for which scintillate throughout his fiction, from the boy in The Pale King who becomes obsessed with the anatomical challenge of kissing himself on every part of his body to the garrulous pet cockatiel named Vlad the Impaler in The Broom of the System (1987), which keeps inopportunely squawking out imitations of the affectless clichés of its owner's conflicts with her boyfriend.
Wallace incorporated failure, or at least a willingly avowed inadequacy, into his own rhetorical habits – the circuitous digressiveness, the quasi-academic footnotes that generate their own footnotes, maladroit lopsided constructions, needless reaffirmations of the antecedents of impersonal pronouns, proliferating compound possessives ('her grandmother's bedroom's mirror's left edge's tarnishing'). This insistence on fumbled colloquiality throws into deep focus his undoubted, but sparsely deployed, lyrical and descriptive gifts. Hayes-Brady roots out a vitiating tone in the journalistic essays, in which Wallace repeatedly disclaims his own competence, affecting to eschew any authorial expertise in the very act of drawing on it, an effect, as she nicely puts it, 'like Caesar refusing the crown while simultaneously wielding its power'. His trip to the Illinois State Fair for Harper's is a riot of pitch-perfect observation, but his 1995 Caribbean cruise, the closing title-piece of A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (1997), is let down by his greater interest in the operational structure of the cruise company than in what might be thought a novelist's more pressing concern, the other passengers.
Rereading the stories in Girl With Curious Hair (1989), his first and finest compendium of short fiction, is to be reminded of the spasm of excitement that Wallace's arrival caused in an American literary world grown jaded through articulations of unhinged sociopathy à la Easton Ellis and endless attempts to intubate the detective genre. Wallace's own troubled personal trajectory is acutely mirrored in the arc of his literary production, in which the desire to show how many different ways there are of not being able to articulate, together with the Beckett-like imperative to articulate, albeit at exponentially greater rather than micrologically shrinking length, would have gone on producing one colossal beached whale after another, works that seem on their inert surfaces to be barely breathing, but are teeming beneath with the neural transmissions of an obsessive interrogative intelligence.
Much of the secondary literature has done little more than restate his position in American letters at the crux of a moribund postmodernism and the emergence of what has been termed the 'New Sincerity', outlining the textual strategies by which Wallace enunciated contemporary American anomie, aligning his work with currents in recent ethical and linguistic philosophy. It helped that Wallace himself, a much more cooperative interviewee than literary figures tend to present, was so voluble in discussing his own work, so that matching up his authorial pronouncements to the finished product is a more straightforward matter than it has been in the case of writers such as Philip Roth or the doggedly mute Thomas Pynchon.
Among another recent clutch of Wallace studies, Clare Hayes-Brady's book stands out as a more incisive attempt than many to get to grips with the philosophical underpinnings of Wallace's output, in both fiction and journalism. It began as academic research and, as is often the way, hasn't entirely shaken off that aura in its transition to book form, but has much to say about the stylistic and political aspects of Wallace's writing that ought to appeal to his many cult followers on both sides of the Atlantic. Hayes-Brady is a sensitive and ethically alert reader of Wallace, and she hasn't gone down the line of least resistance that others have of simply reproducing great chunks of quotation from the originals and letting them speak for themselves.
Resistance indeed, as the subtitle suggests, is one of the key themes of this study. Principally, it indicates the resistance to closure in Wallace's fiction, whereby what matters is not the final destination but the excursion itself, as well as the broken, short-circuited and comic lacunae that structure modern communication. If Wallace's work arose from the embers of postmodernist experiment, it also has less overtly acknowledged roots in the European modernism of the interwar years and the sociocultural critique of the immediate postwar period. The crisis in communication is at least as old as the Great War, but what Wallace's work recognises is that each generation finds different ways of not being able to say things to each other. In the era of saturation TV, mass culture and the internet, it may be that nobody even knows what it is they might want to say, but that in itself, as Hayes-Brady and others have shown, is no argument for giving up.
CS Lewis once said that there was no getting around the fact that we need to pay critical attention to anything to discover whether it was worth our attention in the first place, an evaluative labour that requires an intensity of mental effort for which ever fewer citizens of modern reality are equipped, or even interested in. This might be one aspect of what President Jimmy Carter was ridiculed for calling 'the modern malaise', a possibility there might be so much formal freedom in today's world that its subjects have ceased to experience themselves as free. It is not in party-political allegiance that critical awareness might be born, though, but in deep reflection on the faculty of reflection itself. 'It is not boredom that is killing for Wallace,' as Hayes-Brady puts it, 'but passivity.'
The closed circles of dedication and dependency in which the characters of Infinite Jest (1996) are caught are transparently cognate. Teenage sporting prodigies at the tennis academy are as trapped in the imperatives of their particular institutionally governed self-images as the recovering substance addicts are at the nearby halfway house, and as are the Québécois wheelchair militants mounting peripheral nocturnal and discursive assaults on a North American geopolitical hegemony. The unattainable Kafkaesque grail of the action is an elusive video referred to as 'The Entertainment', which is purported to be so immersively, fatally spellbinding that those who see it will never need to self-reflect, or to think, again.
In the context of these philosophical concerns, Hayes-Brady zeroes in on what she calls the 'troubled articulation of the relationship of self and other' in Wallace's writing, which is to say a troubled articulation of a troubled relationship. Wallace was entirely open about his consuming interest in self-help literature and the 'fake it till you make it' ideology of Twelve Steps recovery programmes, according to which if you only keep pretending that the therapeutic medicine is working, it eventually might. For the same reason, surrendering to something you don't believe in may just turn out to be transformative, and one of the ways in which one might achieve that is by enacting the outward performances of intimate relations with others, in the vague hope that, somehow, sincerity might emerge from them.
Hayes-Brady finds the limits of her patience with Wallace in this context. She doesn't like his attitude to romance, still less his versions of sexual and racial identity politics, and she seems rather shocked that there are so many dysfunctional and abusive relationships in his fiction, as though the writer's duty were to portray the world, if not as it ought to be, then at least in its potential development in that direction. Otherwise, she feels, hope itself is foreclosed, even amid conditions of the general denial of closure. Her concluding summary of Wallace's failures concludes with 'his impoverished recognition of the other.’
If there is more than academic duty to diversity in this stance – and she is right to deprecate the excruciating ritual self-abnegations Wallace stages as a privileged white male in his co-authored book on rap culture – it misses the mark because it fails in itself to see that 'the other' is precisely what has become unavailable to modern consciousness, since it was turned into an other in itself by totalising social collectivity. The best aspects of Wallace's writing lie in their reflection of radical self-estrangement, metaphors for which scintillate throughout his fiction, from the boy in The Pale King who becomes obsessed with the anatomical challenge of kissing himself on every part of his body to the garrulous pet cockatiel named Vlad the Impaler in The Broom of the System (1987), which keeps inopportunely squawking out imitations of the affectless clichés of its owner's conflicts with her boyfriend.
Wallace incorporated failure, or at least a willingly avowed inadequacy, into his own rhetorical habits – the circuitous digressiveness, the quasi-academic footnotes that generate their own footnotes, maladroit lopsided constructions, needless reaffirmations of the antecedents of impersonal pronouns, proliferating compound possessives ('her grandmother's bedroom's mirror's left edge's tarnishing'). This insistence on fumbled colloquiality throws into deep focus his undoubted, but sparsely deployed, lyrical and descriptive gifts. Hayes-Brady roots out a vitiating tone in the journalistic essays, in which Wallace repeatedly disclaims his own competence, affecting to eschew any authorial expertise in the very act of drawing on it, an effect, as she nicely puts it, 'like Caesar refusing the crown while simultaneously wielding its power'. His trip to the Illinois State Fair for Harper's is a riot of pitch-perfect observation, but his 1995 Caribbean cruise, the closing title-piece of A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (1997), is let down by his greater interest in the operational structure of the cruise company than in what might be thought a novelist's more pressing concern, the other passengers.
Rereading the stories in Girl With Curious Hair (1989), his first and finest compendium of short fiction, is to be reminded of the spasm of excitement that Wallace's arrival caused in an American literary world grown jaded through articulations of unhinged sociopathy à la Easton Ellis and endless attempts to intubate the detective genre. Wallace's own troubled personal trajectory is acutely mirrored in the arc of his literary production, in which the desire to show how many different ways there are of not being able to articulate, together with the Beckett-like imperative to articulate, albeit at exponentially greater rather than micrologically shrinking length, would have gone on producing one colossal beached whale after another, works that seem on their inert surfaces to be barely breathing, but are teeming beneath with the neural transmissions of an obsessive interrogative intelligence.