IJ study archive

Esto no es una necrológica: David Foster Wallace

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TL;DR

A death-week profile (Letras Libres, PERFIL, octubre 2008) by the Argentine novelist and critic Rodrigo Fresán, written days after Wallace's suicide and built as an explicit anti-obituary — its refrain is that this is not a necrológica but a jacket-copy celebration of one of the most alive and durable bodies of work in contemporary literature. Fresán situates La broma infinita (the Spanish Infinite Jest) as the axis of his generation's reading life, walks its hype-campaign reception (the “Novela King Kong” adored by natives and beaten down by tourists), rebuts the anti-Wallace critics (Dale Peck et al.) with their own sneers, and closes on Wallace's Kafka-essay image of art as a door we pound on that finally opens outward — we were inside what we wanted all along. Its rarest feature for the archive is register-structural, not evidentiary: the piece quotes no one at first hand — every quoted span is back-translation (Wallace in Spanish ×2; English critics in Fresán's Spanish ×7), so the quote authority for the Wallace-voice content resolves elsewhere (the Kafka door image is HELD in English at dfw-laughing-with-kafka). Reception/legacy material with essentially no Infinite Jest-internal crux.

Key claims

(Fresán's argument, paraphrased from his unquoted Spanish essay unless a span is quoted below. His own firsthand words appear in the source only as onomatopoeia and a one-word aside; the piece's only sentence-length quoted matter is back-translated Wallace and back-translated critics; we paraphrase all of it and quote only Fresán's Spanish renderings as his renderings.)

  • The anti-obituary conceit. Fresán refuses the necrológica form: given so little space for the immense, expansive and incommensurable Wallace, he says a just obituary would fill the whole magazine and be embroidered with exhaustive footnotes — so instead he writes what he calls a contratapa (jacket blurb) for one of the most alive and durable works of contemporary literature “Made in usa.” The essay is built in five numbered movements (uno–cinco) and ends where it began: esto no es una necrológica.
  • The bare facts, footnote-style. Wallace (b. Ithaca, New York, 1962) took his life on Friday 12 September 2008; his body was found that night by his wife at their home in Claremont, California. Those who knew him well, Fresán notes, did not seem greatly surprised by the news.
  • A Richard Russo bridge. Fresán learned of the death while finishing Russo's Bridge of Sighs, and pairs the two writers as chroniclers of the disintegration of the United States — families trapped in small towns or in the “inmensos infiernos” (immense hells — gloss ours) of corporate structures — reading La broma infinita as closer to Russo's warm costumbrismo than it looks.
  • The “Novela King Kong” reception. The launch of La broma infinita was, he says, almost a presidential campaign of publicity for a book descended from Gaddis's The Recognitions, Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, Gass's The Tunnel, and before all of them Sterne's Tristram Shandy, Melville's Moby-Dick, Musil's The Man Without Qualities and Proust. It got the treatment every “Novela King Kong” gets (King Kong novel — gloss ours): adored by natives, celebrated by tourists, and beaten down at the same time — the tourists said “ohhhh” and then “aaaagh”.
  • Difficult to write, easy to read. Against the difícil-versus-fácil debate (which, he notes, is what Eggers's foreword is about), Fresán argues the thing few reviewers said plainly: that the near-futurist saga was superbly written, full of moving and sensitive moments, bringing Wallace close to Salinger and Vonnegut — a book difficult to write (the demand it made on its author) but easy to read (the pleasure it gave its reader).
  • Wallace's stated poetics of comfort/disturbance (Wallace-voice — back-translation, paraphrase-only). Fresán reports that in an interview Wallace summarized his intentions by recalling a teacher he liked who held that good writing's task was to give calm to the disturbed and to disturb the calm — the comfort-the-disturbed / disturb-the-comfortable poetics. This is Wallace quoted in Spanish translation; we paraphrase it and never present the Spanish as Wallace verbatim. The canonical English formulation ("to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable") is held in the archive only as an epigraph in canavan-ij-syllabus; no primary-interview English source for it is held, so the line's English wording cannot be pinned to a primary here.
  • The critics turned against him after Infinite Jest. Fresán catalogs the post-IJ backlash on Brief Interviews with Hideous Men and Oblivion: a Seattle Times books editor, Dale Peck's jibe that the book wants to be sodomized, a Miami Herald reviewer on a writer who despises his readers, a Harper's reviewer's baffled half-surrender — all quoted here in Fresán's Spanish (third-party back-translation; the critics' English is not held).
  • Everything and More as Wallace's last joke. He reads the 2003 history of infinity — untranslated because possibly untranslatable — as a final gag: three hundred-odd pages of formulas telling the story of the unending. He quotes James Gleick's back-cover praise (again in Spanish) and, paraphrasing Gleick, credits Wallace with embracing the supposed compatibility of brain and heart across his fiction and non-fiction.
  • Death resurrects the book. As he writes, La broma infinita has climbed to No. 16 on Amazon's bestseller ranking — a good result of a bad one, “El Año del Escritor Suicida” (the Year of the Suicide Writer — gloss ours), which he thinks would have amused Wallace; newcomers are welcomed to the joke, seduced by the media impact of the tragic “The End” of a brief life.
  • The Kafka door, as the last word (Wallace-voice — back-translation; English HELD). Fresán closes not on the suicide but on what Wallace wrote about Kafka in Consider the Lobster (Spanish Hablemos de langostas): Kafka's art as a "kind of door" we approach and knock on ever harder, desperate to be let in — needing it — until the door finally opens outward: we were inside what we wanted all along. This is Wallace's published prose quoted in Spanish translation; the English original is HELD (the Harper's 1998 essay text in the archive — the "kind of door" phrase lives there; see also dfw-laughing-with-kafka) ("and it opens outward: we've been inside what we wanted all along"), so quote authority resolves there — we paraphrase the Spanish and never present it as Wallace verbatim.

Theories & evidence

CONNECTION: Wallace's own stated poetics — good writing comforts the disturbed and disturbs the comfortable — read as the moral/earnest program beneath the "difficult postmodernist" reputation

  • Crux: sincerity-definition
  • Stance: mentions
  • Evidence:
    • [Wallace — back-translation] Fresán's report of Wallace's interview line: the task of good writing is “darle calma a los perturbados y perturbar a los que están calmados” (to give calm to the disturbed and disturb the calm — gloss ours), which Wallace attributed to a teacher he liked. BACK-TRANSLATION of Wallace's English interview speech — paraphrase-only for Wallace's voice; the Spanish is Fresán's rendering and is NOT presented as Wallace verbatim. [section tres, on Wallace's intentions]
    • [author] Fresán's own paraphrase-of-Gleick coda: Wallace “abrazó en sus ficciones y no ficciones la supuesta compatibilidad entre el cerebro y el corazón” (embraced, in his fiction and non-fiction, the supposed compatibility between brain and heart — gloss ours). Firsthand Fresán essay-prose (quotable as his words). [section cuatro, after the Gleick blurb]
  • Notes: Oeuvre/reception-scoped mentions-grade sighting — consonant with the archive's large sincerity-definition lane (the earnest/moralist Wallace against the ironist framing; convergent with the Blumenbach note's separate always-moral and enormous-empathy points and the Nesi note's underlying-humanity reading). The comfort/disturb poetics is Wallace's own stated aim but arrives here BACK-TRANSLATED, so it is paraphrase-only for Wallace's voice; Fresán's brain/heart line is his firsthand framing. Fresán advances no argument about Infinite Jest's interior — this is a poetics-of-the-oeuvre sighting, not an IJ crux. A mention-level sighting only.

CONNECTION: The novel's difficulty as reputation, not obstacle — difficult to write but easy to read; the hype-campaign Novela-King-Kong reception

  • Crux: (no home slug — reception/reputation)
  • Stance: n/a (reception texture)
  • Evidence:
    • [author] Fresán's difícil/fácil formulation: La broma infinita was a book “difícil … de escribir pero fácil … de leer” (difficult to write but easy to read — gloss ours), where the difficulty is the demand on the author and the ease is the pleasure given the reader. Firsthand Fresán prose. [section tres]
    • [author] The reception frame: the launch was a “Campaña bestial de publicidad y marketing” (a beastly campaign of publicity and marketing — gloss ours) for a “Novela King Kong” adored by natives and beaten down by tourists. Firsthand Fresán prose. [section tres]
  • Notes: Logged as a reception/reputation sighting with NO home slug — the difficulty-reputation and hype-campaign material is reception-scoped and the archive holds no legacy/reputation/canonization slug (index checked; nothing is coined here). It is adjacency-only to entertainment-lethality's anti-entertainment reception pole and to the archive's difficulty-reputation reception layers; Fresán argues accessibility, not lethality, so no entertainment-lethality block is opened. It sits beside the Esposito reception cluster, where Fresán is already a named witness.

Themes

The anti-obituary / anti-necrológica conceit (the refusal of the form; the piece as a contratapa jacket-blurb; the five numbered movements ending where they began); La broma infinita as the axis of a generation's reading in Spanish; the hype-campaign reception (the “Novela King Kong”; the presidential-campaign launch; the Gaddis/Pynchon/Gass/Sterne/Melville/Musil/Proust genealogy; adored-by-natives / abated-by-tourists); the difficulty debate (difícil versus fácil; the Eggers foreword; difficult-to-write-but-easy-to-read; the decoding sites and reading guides); the anti-Wallace critical backlash (Peck, the Seattle Times, the Miami Herald, Harper's) answered with its own sneers; Wallace's stated poetics of comfort/disturbance (back-translated); Everything and More as the last untranslatable joke and the brain/heart compatibility (paraphrasing Gleick); death as book-resurrection (the Amazon rank; “El Año del Escritor Suicida”; the tragic “The End”); and the closing Kafka-door image of difficult art as a threshold that opens onto where we already were.

Cross-references

  • esposito-ij-around-the-world — the closest companion. Esposito's cross-language translation round-up holds Rodrigo Fresán himself as the Spanish-language reception witness (his line that Jest is "far more talked about than read, a thing that has increased since the novelist’s suicide and sanctification"), and covers the Spanish edition (Javier Calvo and Marcelo Covián, Mondadori 2002). This 2008 profile is the same critic's death-week version of the same reception argument — the talked-about-more-than-read / sanctification thesis in its originating moment; the two form the Fresán reception pair.
  • dfw-laughing-with-kafka — the HELD English original of the Kafka-door image Fresán closes on. The Spanish "Hablemos de langostas" Fresán cites is the Consider the Lobster version ("Some Remarks on Kafka's Funniness…") of the same Harper's/PEN essay; quote authority for the door image resolves here ("and it opens outward: we've been inside what we wanted all along").
  • canavan-ij-syllabus — holds the canonical English formulation of the comfort/disturb poetics ("to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable") as an epigraph (Canavan quoting Wallace). It is a secondary carrier, not the primary interview, so it does not fully resolve Fresán's back-translated line.
  • cohen-konstantinou-legacy-of-dfw — the legacy/posthumous-reputation companion; this profile is a death-week legacy primary in the Spanish-speaking world and sits beside the archive's Anglophone legacy scholarship.
  • The translator-testimony cluster (blumenbach-trashpool-2011, nesi-minimaetmoralia-intervista, kerline-books-2015) — adjacency only. This is a Spanish-language RECEPTION primary, not a translator interview: it does not discuss the Covián/Calvo Spanish translation as translation (they are unnamed; La broma infinita appears only in the bibliography as Mondadori 2002). Do NOT file it in the translator cluster.

Notable passages

Fresán's words unless marked. Spanish is the verbatim anchor; the English in parentheses is our gloss (paraphrase). The two Wallace-voice spans are BACK-TRANSLATIONS — the Spanish is Fresán's rendering of Wallace's English and is NOT a Wallace verbatim quote; for the Kafka door image, quote authority resolves to the held English at dfw-laughing-with-kafka. The seven critic spans are Fresán's Spanish renderings of English-original critics (not those critics' verbatim English). Curly Spanish typography reproduced as printed.

  • Wallace (back-translation — paraphrase-only; NOT a Wallace verbatim quote): “darle calma a los perturbados y perturbar a los que están calmados” (to give calm to the disturbed and disturb the calm — gloss ours) — Wallace's interview account of good writing's task, attributed to a teacher he liked.
  • Wallace (back-translation; English HELD at dfw-laughing-with-kafka — paraphrase-only): Kafka's art as an “especie de puerta” (a kind of door — gloss ours) we knock on, and the close “que durante todo el tiempo ya estábamos dentro de lo que queríamos” (that all along we were already inside what we wanted — gloss ours; the held English reads "we've been inside what we wanted all along").
  • Salon.com Reader's Guide, in Fresán's Spanish (third-party back-translation): “¿Es David Foster Wallace, como algunos creen, el escritor más importante de su generación? Está claro que cuenta con la combinación necesaria de intelecto, talento y ambición en cantidades extravagantes” (Is David Foster Wallace, as some believe, the most important writer of his generation? He clearly has the necessary combination of intellect, talent and ambition in extravagant quantities — gloss ours).
  • Dale Peck, in Fresán's Spanish (third-party back-translation): what Wallace's prose more or less unconsciously expressed was “sus ganas de ser sodomizado” (his desire to be sodomized — gloss ours).
  • The Miami Herald reviewer, in Fresán's Spanish (third-party back-translation): “pocas veces ha existido un escritor que desprecie más a los lectores” (rarely has there existed a writer who despises readers more — gloss ours).
  • The Harper's reviewer, in Fresán's Spanish (third-party back-translation): “Wallace está en su derecho de escribir un gran libro que sólo gente como él pueda entender…” (Wallace is within his rights to write a great book that only people like him can understand… — gloss ours).
  • The Seattle Times books editor, in Fresán's Spanish (third-party back-translation): “Citaría aquí alguna oración de algún relato de Extinción, pero no me quedaría espacio suficiente para el resto de la crítica” (I would quote here some sentence from a story in Oblivion, but I would not have enough space left for the rest of the review — gloss ours).
  • James Gleick's back-cover blurb, in Fresán's Spanish (third-party back-translation): “Wallace + lo infinito: ¡maravillosa pareja!” (Wallace + the infinite: a marvelous pair! — gloss ours), and “Esta es la más exquisita (e hilarante) ensayística científica. Wallace abraza la incompatibilidad de las matemáticas y la prosa y extrae arte de ella. Y, también, cuenta una gran historia.” (This is the most exquisite (and hilarious) scientific essay-writing. Wallace embraces the incompatibility of mathematics and prose and extracts art from it. And, also, he tells a great story. — gloss ours).
  • Fresán (firsthand): the “Novela King Kong” reception — the tourists said “ohhhh” and then “aaaagh” (gloss ours); one of Wallace's last “bromas” (jokes — gloss ours) was Everything and More; and the death-bounce he dubs “El Año del Escritor Suicida” (the Year of the Suicide Writer — gloss ours; NB not quote-wrapped in the source — Fresán's coinage in running prose).

Accuracy notes

Cite-as-written throughout (textual contradictions preserved as printed).

  • Internal title inconsistency — Girl with Curious Hair. The body calls it “La chica del pelo raro” (section tres), the bibliography “La niña del pelo raro” (Mondadori, 2000). Both are Fresán's/the magazine's, reproduced as printed; the actual Mondadori title is La niña del pelo raro.
  • Internal title inconsistency — A Supposedly Fun Thing…. The body gives “Algo supuestamente divertido que no volveré a hacer (1997)”, the bibliography “Algo supuestamente divertido que nunca volveré a hacer, Mondadori, 2001”. Body: no volveré; bibliography: nunca volveré. Reproduced as printed.
  • English-original vs. Spanish-translation dates blurred in the body. The running text tags several works with their English-original years as if identifying the books by those dates — Algo supuestamente divertido… “(1997)” (English A Supposedly Fun Thing is 1997; the Mondadori Spanish is 2001) and Hablemos de langostas “(2005)” (English Consider the Lobster is 2005; the Mondadori Spanish is 2007). The bibliography carries the correct Spanish-edition years. Cite-as-written.
  • Third-party critic quotes are unverifiable against their English originals. The Salon.com Reader's Guide, Seattle Times, Dale Peck, Miami Herald, Harper's and James Gleick quotes are given only in Fresán's Spanish; the English originals are not held in the archive. They are reproduced as Fresán's Spanish (byte-true), not as those sources' verbatim English.
  • Biographical facts check out. Wallace born Ithaca, New York, 1962 (correct); died Friday 12 September 2008 in Claremont, California, found by his wife (correct; 12 Sept 2008 was a Friday). La broma infinita page count “1,079 páginas” with the 2006 reissue carrying Dave Eggers's foreword (correct — the 10th-anniversary edition).
  • "Made in usa" / "sites" / "american psycho" lowercasing. The source prints “Made in usa”, “american psycho”, “sites de internet”, “Salon. com” (the last split by a line-wrap in the raw) as styled/printed; reproduced as printed, not corrected.