Come On, Pilgrim

TL;DR

Elizabeth Lopatto's Winter 2012 Kenyon Review essay braids a research trip to the Harry Ransom Center's Wallace archive with the Kenyon commencement address (This Is Water) — Lopatto is a Kenyon alum who was in the audience — and a week at South by Southwest, to interrogate the "St. Dave" cult that grew up around Wallace after his death. Its interpretive value is as one of the sharper skeptical takes on the sanctification of Wallace: it restores the speech's redacted suicide passage from the drafts, reads the whole address as a private "pep talk" Wallace aimed at his younger self, and entertains a genuinely adversarial reading — that the choose-how-you-see-the-world ethic can curdle into "pure, brutal solipsism." Along the way it advances readings of Wallace's anti-irony sincerity and of Infinite Jest's length as a deliberate antidote to the attention economy.

Key claims

• The archive scene: Wallace's papers are "among the most heavily-used" at the HRC (ordinarily ~four visitors a month; twenty scholars during SXSW). The "Wallace pilgrims" skew young, male ("about sixty-forty"), Californian/New Yorker — a gendered fan demographic Lopatto observes with irony.
• The commencement speech: Lopatto recovers, from the drafts and the live transcript, a passage "universally omitted in the newspaper reprints" — "It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger." She argues cutting it "obscures a warning about the menaces of narcissism" and helps "elevate Wallace into a kind of St. Dave, our doomed prophet of the modern age, making him into something purer and less scary than he was."
• The drafts show the address "explicitly addressed to a younger version of himself": Wallace crosses out the phrase "young Dave in the back row." Lopatto reads the speech as "a message he wanted to send to himself," "a pep talk not meant necessarily for the graduates, as Wallace concedes."
• The extemporaneous opener she loves (redacted from print because extemporaneous): Wallace at the podium — "Feel free to perspire because I-- I'm gonna."
• Irony and sincerity: Wallace "was funny, but he wasn't kidding"; he wrote about irony for a generation "born into a landscape saturated with the stuff" — up to, "in Wallace's words," the "ironic 80's true Angel of Death himself, David Letterman."
• The attention-economy reading of Infinite Jest: against "video clips no longer than five minutes, a 1,000-page book is a serious commitment indeed," and "finishing the book is an excellent reminder that there is a great deal of satisfaction to be found in commitment" — the novel as an antidote to fragmented attention (Lopatto flags this too as a cliché).
• The elitism of Wallace's readership (a book "as formally odd and structurally difficult as Infinite Jest") sits uneasily with the humble St. Dave image; the usage-essay "Democratic Spirit" ("one that combines rigor and humility") is Wallace "reminding himself that his elitism won't serve him, that there is another valuable way of approaching the world".
• The SXSW throughline: advertising-as-content (Pabst, NPR, Facebook, the Camel "WARNING: This product can cause mouth cancer" sign) read through Wallace's "Up, Simba" — the salesman's "tiny pain, more like a twinge, and often unconscious."
• She cites "the fan site The Howling Fantods" as where fans' intensely personal bond with Wallace is on display.

Theories & evidence

THEORY: Wallace's project is anti-irony sincerity — "funny, but he wasn't kidding"

• Crux: new-sincerity (CANDIDATE — not in the registry; nearest existing slugs kelly-dialectic-of-sincerity / sincerity-definition; folding seat to rule)
• Stance: endorses
• Evidence:
  • [secondary] Lopatto: countless readers "failed to understand--or perhaps didn't want to understand--that Wallace was funny, but he wasn't kidding." [¶ "Irony is a big part of Wallace's legacy…"]
  • [author] Wallace on the ironized 80s: "ironic 80's true Angel of Death himself, David Letterman" — irony as a landscape to escape, not inhabit. [¶ "He wrote about irony and its pitfalls…"]
• Notes: Presented as reception truth about how Wallace is misread; the essay endorses the sincerity-over-irony reading without in-source pushback.

THEORY: The This Is Water ethic can curdle into brutal solipsism — a skeptical reading of the redemptive-Wallace "St. Dave" cult

• Crux: this-is-water-connection
• Stance: complicates
• Evidence:
  • [secondary] Her friend Andrew's view, which she sometimes thinks is right: "the moral standard set out in the commencement address … was pure, brutal solipsism." "wrong and nihilistic and anti-human" — the "choose what world you live in" ethic fitting "a world that is All About You." [¶ "But sometimes I think that Andrew's right…"]
  • [draft] The address was drafted "explicitly addressed to a younger version of himself" (the struck "young Dave in the back row"), i.e., a private self-persuasion, not counsel for others. [¶ "This is borne out in the drafts…"]
  • [inference] The redacted suicide passage ("the terrible master") as a "warning about the menaces of narcissism" the sanctified version erases. [¶ "Again, there are understandable reasons…"]
• Notes: Counterweight is in-source and constitutive of the complicates stance: Lopatto hedges throughout ("rightly or wrongly"), and finally rejects the caricature — "St. Dave isn't who Wallace was, I think. The man himself must have been more conflicted and more interesting than that caricature." So the block records a problematizing of the redemptive reading (granting its force, disputing its sanctification), not a flat claim that Wallace's ethic is solipsistic. Touches communication-solipsism (the novel's solipsism theme) as the crux this reading pushes against.

THEORY: Infinite Jest's length is a deliberate antidote to the fragmented attention economy — commitment as its own reward

• Crux: length-as-time
• Stance: advances
• Evidence:
  • [inference] "When the attention economy is predicated on video clips no longer than five minutes, a 1,000-page book is a serious commitment indeed. And finishing the book is an excellent reminder that there is a great deal of satisfaction to be found in commitment." [¶ "All of this is pretty tiring…"]
  • [secondary] The novel as the "emotional break: a medium in which the reader is isolated in her contact with the author," against a culture of accelerating, disposable hip. [¶ same]
• Notes: Lopatto immediately flags her own reading as "a cliché," i.e., offers it half-ironically; recorded as advances with that self-deprecation noted. Adjacent to reading-as-rehab (the book as attention-retraining) — cross-listed there for the popularity axis.

Themes

Irony versus sincerity (Wallace's central preoccupation); the sanctification of the author ("St. Dave") and the ethics of biographical worship; solipsism and "a world that is All About You"; advertising, the attention economy, and art-as-content (the SXSW spine, read through "Up, Simba"); suicide and "the terrible master"; the gendered, elitist Wallace fandom.

Cross-references

• themillions-shapland-cataloging-pale-king — the other 2012 essay that reads the archive against Wallace-fandom's gender and cult-of-personality dynamics; Lopatto and Shapland are companion skeptical voices (both note the "boys' club"/male-pilgrim demographic).
• The commencement address is This Is Water; this essay is a primary reception document for the this-is-water-connection crux and its relation to Infinite Jest's anti-solipsism and sincerity themes.
• The "Up, Simba" / advertising material connects to Wallace's media critique and to Infinite Jest's entertainment/attention themes (the anti-entertainment and commercial-consumption readings), though the essay argues it through the nonfiction, not the novel.
• "The Howling Fantods" fan site is the namesake of this archive's own Howling-Fantods source sweep; Lopatto's citation is a period snapshot of the fan community.

Notable passages

• The recovered commencement passage: "adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger."
• The extemporaneous opener: "Feel free to perspire because I-- I'm gonna."
• On irony: Wallace "was funny, but he wasn't kidding."
• On the sanctified image: a "St. Dave, our doomed prophet of the modern age".
• The adversarial reading: the address's ethic as "pure, brutal solipsism … wrong and nihilistic and anti-human."
• On the novel and attention: "a 1,000-page book is a serious commitment indeed."
• Wallace's "Democratic Spirit, one that combines rigor and humility, i.e., passionate conviction plus a sedulous respect for the conviction of others."