Jonathan Franzen, \"Farther Away\"

TL;DR

Jonathan Franzen's long 2011 New Yorker essay, published the week The Pale King appeared, folds a solo trek to the remote Pacific island of Masafuera — to scatter some of Wallace's ashes and reread Robinson Crusoe — into the rawest and most contested account we have of Wallace the man and the writer, by his closest writer-friend. Its argument runs on two joined ideas: that boredom is the soil of addiction, and that suicide's logic is addiction's, so that "it seems fair to say that David died of boredom" once his hope for the new novel failed. Franzen sets this against the "saintly" public Wallace, insisting the real man was more lovable and more "dubious" than the legend, and reads Wallace's fiction as dispatches from the "farthest-away island" of the self — loved by readers precisely for cataloguing a despair in which ordinary love has almost no place. It is a primary-friend document of the loneliness/boredom reading of Wallace, and the source of the narcissism-and-misogyny charge-list that later critics quote and rebut.

Key claims

• The frame: on the eve of a birdwatching trip to Masafuera (one of the Juan Fernández islands, the real Robinson Crusoe archipelago), Wallace's widow, Karen, asks Franzen to carry some of Wallace's ashes: "she asked me, out of the blue, whether I might like to take along some of David’s cremation ashes and scatter them on Masafuera." Franzen's own "flight from myself" had begun after the 2008 suicide, when he chose "anger and work" over grief.
• The boredom argument: Franzen ties Wallace's death to a failure of fiction, not only to a chemical relapse. "When his hope for fiction died, after years of struggle with the new novel, there was no other way out but death"; if boredom feeds addiction and suicide shares addiction's logic, then "it seems fair to say that David died of boredom." Fiction had been "his way off the island" of the self — Wallace was "very explicit, in our many discussions of the purpose of novels," that fiction was the solution "to the problem of existential solitude."
• Against the saint: "The people who knew David least well are most likely to speak of him in saintly terms." Franzen argues that ordinary love is almost missing from the work — "the near-perfect absence, in his fiction, of ordinary love" — with "Close loving relationships … have no standing in the Wallace fictional universe", yet devoted readers feel loved by it anyway: "we feel the love in the fact of his art, and we love him for it."
• The Nardil narrative, complicated: the adulatory public story has a unitary, gifted Wallace who, "after quitting the antidepressant Nardil, which he’d been taking for twenty years, succumbed to major depression". Franzen "pass[es] over the question of diagnosis" and offers instead a "duality" — a "secret self," the "old addict's consciousness," that used the medication change to "break free." He stresses that "the difference between well and not well is in more respects a difference of degree than of kind."
• Infinite Jest as anti-monoculture, and prescient in form: the novel set out to resist a coming world of interchangeable, "identically entertained" individuals — "This was the monocultural spectre that David had envisioned and set out to resist in his epic" Infinite Jest. Its formal mode "anticipated" the internet: "the mode of his resistance in that novel—annotation, digression, nonlinearity, hyperlinkage—anticipated the even more virulent and even more radically individualistic invader that is now displacing the novel".
• The ashes: at an altar of paired boulders above the ocean, "I opened the box of ashes and threw them up into the wind"; Franzen frames the act as honoring a choice — "David had chosen to leave the people who loved him and give himself to the world of the novel and its readers". The essay closes on Richardson's Pamela and the individualism-vs-love lineage that runs "as late as Beckett and Wallace".

Themes

Loneliness and solipsism (fiction as the leap off the island of the self); boredom and addiction as joined engines of the suicide; depression and the resistance to a single, exculpatory diagnosis; entertainment, monoculture, and the internet; grief, friendship, and the gap between the public saint and the private man; reception (how devoted readers receive despair as love).

Cross-references

• franzen-nymag-on-dfw-2011 — the NY Mag / Vulture write-up that excerpted this essay; that note framed the piece through one long quotation, and this is the full primary text behind it.
• karen-green-2011 — Wallace's widow, who gives Franzen the ashes and the errand that structures the essay.
• baskin-coming-to-terms — the essay-length 2012 rebuttal; Baskin quotes this piece's charge-list and argues Wallace's self-fiction is a discipline of self-forgetting, against Franzen's narcissism reading.
• bbc-endnotes-dfw-2011 and dtmax-2009-the-unfinished — the same season's accounts of the stalled Pale King and the Nardil decision; the boredom-death reading here is the primary-friend version of the stall.
• lipsky-becoming-yourself and the Salon "last days" feature — the other close accounts of the death and its aftermath.

Notable passages

• "it seems fair to say that David died of boredom."
• "When his hope for fiction died, after years of struggle with the new novel, there was no other way out but death."
• "the near-perfect absence, in his fiction, of ordinary love."
• "The people who knew David least well are most likely to speak of him in saintly terms."
• "He was a lifelong prisoner on the island of himself."
• "This was the monocultural spectre that David had envisioned and set out to resist in his epic" Infinite Jest.
• "we feel the love in the fact of his art, and we love him for it."

Theories & evidence

THEORY: Wallace's fiction is a bid to escape the solitude of the self — dispatches from the "farthest-away island," received by readers as love even though ordinary love is nearly absent from the work

• Crux: communication-solipsism
• Stance: advances
• Evidence:
  • [author] Wallace's own stated view, reported by Franzen: he was "very explicit, in our many discussions of the purpose of novels," that fiction was the best solution "to the problem of existential solitude"; fiction was "his way off the island" of the self. [essay body]
  • [secondary] Franzen's reading: readers feel "recognized and comforted, how loved" by the work — "we feel the love in the fact of his art, and we love him for it." [essay body]
  • [secondary] The paradox that grounds the reading — "the near-perfect absence, in his fiction, of ordinary love", with "Close loving relationships … have no standing in the Wallace fictional universe". [essay body]
• Notes: The counter-tension is internal and load-bearing: Franzen advances the fiction-as-antidote-to-solitude reading while simultaneously arguing that ordinary love is almost absent from the work (the IJ example he reaches for is "the cranial-fluid-dripping wife" — his own impressionistic gloss, not a located passage). The reading is that despair rendered with total honesty is itself received as love — a claim about form and reception, not about the characters' relationships.

THEORY: Wallace "died of boredom" — his suicide as the endpoint of a blocked new novel, boredom feeding addiction feeding suicide (the incompletion counterfactual, from the closest friend)

• Crux: pale-king-incompletion
• Stance: advances
• Evidence:
  • [secondary] "When his hope for fiction died, after years of struggle with the new novel, there was no other way out but death"; the phenomenology of suicidality equated with that of addiction, so "it seems fair to say that David died of boredom." [essay body]
  • [secondary] The blocked-novel datum: Wallace "was blocked with his work when he decided to quit Nardil—was bored with his old tricks and unable to muster enough excitement about his new novel to find a way forward with it" (em-dashes as in the source). [essay body]
• Notes: Franzen hedges this heavily: he offers it as "arguably, in one interpretation of his suicide, David had died of boredom"; he explicitly declines to settle the medical question ("I will pass over the question of diagnosis" — "it’s possible he was not simply depressive"); and his larger argument complicates the simple Nardil-withdrawal-relapse story with a "duality" (a "secret self" using the drug change to break free). It is the closest-friend written version of an incompletion argument that D.T. Max has otherwise made only in radio conversation, never in his own print.

THEORY: Infinite Jest foresaw and resisted a monoculture of interchangeable, "identically entertained" selves — and its very form anticipated the internet

• Crux: media-prescience
• Stance: advances
• Evidence:
  • [secondary] "This was the monocultural spectre that David had envisioned and set out to resist in his epic" Infinite Jest — a world of "a universal crowd of individuals whose most salient characteristic is their being identically entertained." [essay body]
  • [secondary] The formal-anticipation claim: "the mode of his resistance in that novel—annotation, digression, nonlinearity, hyperlinkage—anticipated the even more virulent and even more radically individualistic invader that is now displacing the novel"; "To be everything and more is the Internet’s ambition, too." [essay body]
• Notes: Franzen's version is distinctive: not that the novel's content predicted a technology, but that its form (the footnote/hyperlink architecture) prefigured the internet's individualizing pull. A 2011 prescience sighting from a novelist peer; framing-level, no lethality-mechanics claim.