IJ study archive

Allard den Dulk, DFW19 keynote: The Depressed Person, B.I. #20, and Notes from Underground

source

TL;DR

The 2019 ISU keynote (84 min): den Dulk reads "The Depressed Person" and "B.I. #20" as companion pieces to Parts 1 and 2 of Notes from Underground, built on Wallace's annotations in Frank's Dostoevsky biography and his copy of Notes at the Ransom Center. Mostly Brief Interviews, not IJ — but the hyperreflexivity/skepticism apparatus, the Kate Gompert argument, and the Ransom Center marginalia all bear on IJ directly, and the closing appropriation discussion touches Wardine. Auto-captions, mangles "Dostoevsky" relentlessly; paraphrase only.

Key claims

  • Dating spine (~min 2-4): the Frank-biography review occupied Wallace through 1995-96; B.I. #20 final draft September 1997; Depressed Person notes June- October 1997 — i.e. the post-IJ Dostoevsky immersion produced both stories.
  • Against the prevailing reading (Holland, Boswell, D.T. Max): the depressed person is not "really just a narcissist" — that diagnosis is unsatisfying precisely because Kate Gompert displays very similar narcissistic features and no scholar doubts her depression (~min 14-16). The story diagnoses a type (per the Underground Man's footnote: such persons "must exist in our society"): cultural tendencies (excessive self-consciousness → meaninglessness → paralysis) that lead to depression and contain narcissistic aspects that worsen it. Judging her "merely a narcissist" refuses kinship and denies the reality of her pain (~min 16-19).
  • Language doesn't fail (~min 22-25): the depressed person's conviction that terms like "agony" are "melodramatic and minimizing" is itself the narcissistic move (in den Dulk's gloss: language cannot grasp how exceptional I am) — and meanwhile she successfully communicates shame, guilt, self-hatred throughout. Scholarship that takes the failure-of-language at face value reproduces the very "congenital skepticism" (Wallace's phrase for our culture's nihilist spell) the stories anatomize. Wickedness, not language, is the obstacle: the underground man's "malignant moans" (Wallace wrote "toothache" in the margin) = the depressed person's manipulative life-or-death demands on her support system (~min 25-31).
  • Ransom Center marginalia (~min 33-37, 68-72): Wallace underlined and copied "ideological eschatology" (Frank's term for carrying an era's ideas to their logical end); wrote "DFW" beside Frank's account of the underground man's vanity-superiority-self-loathing loop; a note den Dulk reads out as saying, roughly, that Notes was humiliating for Wallace to find moving in college because he saw in it the self he loathed and hid; "1990s PC" in the margin beside Dostoevsky's critique of an intelligentsia whose abstract love of humanity never becomes a concrete act; and at the underground man's line that the reader doesn't know what this woman is — Wallace's margin note: "salvation — the woman is salvation" (cf. B.I. #20's "I believed she could save me"). His "use" annotations cluster on statements about the purpose of literature.
  • B.I. #20 as parody-and-reversal of the redeemed-prostitute cliché, as Notes Part 2 was in the 1860s: the hideous man's "confession" is a seduction tactic; his slips (the "dis-" near-disingenuous stumble; past-tense "I could not let her go") betray him; the reader — not the man — is positioned to realize the attention and empathy the story's woman embodies. Reading well (trusting language, attending to what's there) constitutes the conversion the interviewee fakes (~min 40-55).
  • Den Dulk floats (Q&A, ~min 75-77) that "I could not let her go" may hint the interviewee is the sexual predator of the anecdote — the story's racialized psychopath description retracted at the end being his own fabrication.
  • Quote-mark catch (Q&A, ~min 64-67): The Depressed Person uses double quote marks where Wallace's convention is single — suggesting the whole story is one quoted utterance, possibly the depressed person self-objectifying in third person, or a hideous man narrating her (an early manuscript page has "brief interviews with hideous men?" written atop the story) — which would make scholars' eagerness to call her whiny exactly the elicited trap.
  • Appropriation exchange (Q&A, ~min 80-84): den Dulk suggests Wallace was "maybe somewhat overly paralyzed" by whose-story-to-tell anxiety and largely stayed away from voices he feared he couldn't do (the Updike review and the McCarthy no-women-characters parallel raised) — he'd have liked Wallace to "give it a go" more.

Themes

depression-anhedonia (Gompert defense), communication-solipsism (hyperreflexivity, language skepticism), irony-sincerity (trusting vs. suspicious reading).

Cross-references