IJ study archive

The Rewriting of David Foster Wallace

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TL;DR

Christian Lorentzen's New York Magazine essay — the sharpest statement of the case that Wallace, seven years dead, had been "flattened" into a saint — a "wisdom-dispensing sage" and "beacon of earnest self-help" bearing little relation to the difficult, contradiction-courting writer who wrote the books. Lorentzen tracks the sanctification to its engines — the viral Kenyon speech and its This Is Water pamphlet, the End of the Tour biopic — and argues, uneasily, that Wallace "started the process himself." The essay is chiefly reception history, but it engages several live archive cruxes head-on: it rejects the Kenyon speech ("why I dislike it") as the "least interesting version of himself" Wallace ever wrote; it insists on the writer's un-saintly side (a Reagan voter, "a jealous guy who once contemplated buying a gun to knock off a woman’s husband") as essential rather than incidental; it defuses the D. T. Max revelation that Wallace "fudged" facts in his essays; and it credits "E Unibus Pluram" with foreseeing the "new sincerity". Its closing move rescues the writing from the saint: only "if the dead man’s sentences … weren’t still so gloriously alive" would any of this be worth arguing about.

Key claims

  • The flattening. "Nobody owns David Foster Wallace anymore." Since the suicide he has "slipped out of the hands of those who knew him … into the cultural maelstrom, which has flattened him. He has become a character, an icon, and in some circles a saint." He has been "reduced to a wisdom-dispensing sage on the one hand and shorthand for the Writer As Tortured Soul on the other."
  • Wallace as accomplice to his own canonization. The irony Lorentzen names: "whether he intended to or not, Wallace started the process himself" — the publicity campaigns performing disdain for publicity, then "a treacly commencement speech at Kenyon College in 2005 that became a viral sensation" and the "cute, one-sentence-per-page inspirational pamphlet", This Is Water. With the biopic, "The cult could become a church."
  • The three cults. For two decades Wallace's readership was "a cult with several branches": fiction writers ("who also tend to be the most serious readers"), magazine writers (his essays "renewed the possibilities of a fast-aging New Journalism"), and academics (who "hadn’t received the gift of fictional worlds so rich and susceptible to their hermeneutics since Nabokov, Beckett, or Joyce"). Only since Kenyon did the writer become "an idol of quasi-moral veneration, the bard of ironic self-loathing transformed into a beacon of earnest self-help."
  • Against This Is Water. Lorentzen dislikes the speech: its grocery-store parable of adult virtue is "breathtakingly obvious"; what Wallace frames as "a universal rite of passage into maturity seems more to me like the daily struggles of a serious depressive, which he was." "To me, it’s the least interesting version of himself he ever put to the page." The canonization "has been built out of his suffering" — reviving "the Romantic picture of the depressive as a kind of keen-eyed saint."
  • The un-saintly Wallace as essential. It's worth remembering, "as the image of Wallace as slacker saint and liberal sage hardens into Hemingwayesque concrete," that he "was a Reagan voter and a Perot supporter; a jealous guy who once contemplated buying a gun to knock off a woman’s husband"; that "you could always tell that he was kind of an asshole, ever on the verge of being cruel, and not just to himself"; and that "there’s no version of this formula without contempt as an essential element." "He’d probably be the last person to argue for his own sainthood."
  • Fiction / journalism as one project. "Of course, Wallace, too, wrote autofiction, but it was called journalism." The common reflex to "divide Wallace’s fiction from his nonfiction — to treat them almost as the product of two separate brains" is wrong; the "giant floating eyeball" method and its "Asshole Problem" run across both. When D. T. Max "revealed in his 2012 biography … that some facts were fudged and characters made composite in the famous cruise-ship and Illinois State Fair essays," it was nothing "new or all that criminal".
  • EUP predicted the new sincerity. The "melancholy that trickled down, detached from the structural excesses" fed a "garden of sad tomatoes" among younger writers — "something Wallace himself had predicted in his 1993 essay “ E Unibus Pluram,” in which he foresaw a new sincerity as the most viable direction for the generations of “anti-rebel” fiction writers raised on television’s corrosive irony."
  • Franzen's contested reading of the death. Lorentzen relays (without fully endorsing) Franzen's 2011 New Yorker claims — that Wallace "had died of boredom and in despair about his future novels", had "chosen the adulation of strangers over the love of the people closest to him", that it might be "suicide as career move" — the "Kurt Cobain route" — while doubting "career advantage" as a suicide motive.

Theories & evidence

THEORY: The This Is Water / Kenyon speech is the least interesting, most sanctifiable Wallace — a depressive's daily struggle mistaken for universal wisdom — and the engine of his flattening into a self-help saint

  • Crux: this-is-water-connection
  • Stance: rejects
  • Evidence:
    • [secondary] The speech's central example (the grocery-store trip) is "breathtakingly obvious, as Wallace keeps pointing out"; there is "more that it demands of us than overcoming self-centeredness and reflexive sourness." [¶ Water]
    • [inference] What Wallace frames as "a universal rite of passage into maturity seems more to me like the daily struggles of a serious depressive"; "it’s the least interesting version of himself he ever put to the page." [¶ Water]
    • [secondary] The canonization "has been built out of his suffering — the way the cult has revived, for precisely the post-therapy, post-Romantic, self-help-soaked culture Wallace described and intermittently deplored, the Romantic picture of the depressive as a kind of keen-eyed saint." [¶ Water]
  • Notes: In-source counterweight carried: Lorentzen grants the speech's real reach ("millions of YouTube viewers, and thousands of bookstore shoppers disagree") and concedes Wallace apologized in it for delivering "banal platitudes" — i.e. the sage-reading is a mis-hearing Wallace half-anticipated. A minority-critic dissent from the veneration, not a claim the speech is worthless.

THEORY: Wallace's contempt and cruelty — including the misogynistic streak the sanctified image erases — are essential to the writing, not incidental blemishes

  • Crux: wallace-misogyny
  • Stance: mentions
  • Evidence:
    • [secondary] The un-saintly catalogue offered against the "slacker saint" image: "a jealous guy who once contemplated buying a gun to knock off a woman’s husband". [¶ close]
    • [inference] "A large part of Wallace’s appeal … was that you could always tell that he was kind of an asshole, ever on the verge of being cruel, and not just to himself"; "there’s no version of this formula without contempt as an essential element." [¶ close]
  • Notes: The gun/jealousy datum is the Mary Karr gun story relayed secondhand as fact — a reception carrier, not first-person testimony. First-hand doubt on the same story exists elsewhere: a friend who knew Wallace recalled that he "hated guns" (Gale Walden's LRB diary); Lorentzen does not carry that doubt. This is not a block arguing for misogyny — Lorentzen cites the streak as evidence against sainthood.

THEORY: E Unibus Pluram predicted the "new sincerity" that Wallace's melancholy seeded in the next literary generation

  • Crux: eup-connection
  • Stance: mentions
  • Evidence:
    • [secondary] "Wallace himself had predicted" the sad-younger-writer turn "in his 1993 essay “ E Unibus Pluram,” in which he foresaw a new sincerity as the most viable direction for the generations of “anti-rebel” fiction writers raised on television’s corrosive irony." [¶ sad tomatoes]
    • [inference] The mechanism as Lorentzen reads it: "it was the book’s melancholy that trickled down, detached from the structural excesses", visible in the 2007 Granta "Best of Young American Novelists 2" cohort. [¶ sad tomatoes]
  • Notes: A reception-side sighting of the EUP-program-fulfilled reading, scoped to the generation's fiction (the "new sincerity" as literary movement) rather than to IJ's internal execution of the program. Lorentzen also notes the valence of "hysterical realism" (James Wood's coinage for IJ's style) has since shifted to a compliment.

THEORY: Wallace's fiction and journalism are one project; the fudged facts D. T. Max exposed are continuous with his method, not a scandal

  • Crux: nonfiction-fictionalization
  • Stance: complicates
  • Evidence:
    • [secondary] "Of course, Wallace, too, wrote autofiction, but it was called journalism"; the fiction/nonfiction split is a false one. [¶ autofiction]
    • [secondary] D. T. Max's 2012 biography "revealed … that some facts were fudged and characters made composite in the famous cruise-ship and Illinois State Fair essays," prompting "Oh, so that’s why they ran in Harper’s rather than The New Yorker." [¶ autofiction]
    • [inference] Lorentzen's defusing: measured against Joseph Mitchell (per Kunkel's biography), "Wallace wasn’t up to anything new or all that criminal — as a nonfiction writer, he wasn’t right for The New Yorker mostly because he wasn’t a creature of anyone’s house style." [¶ autofiction]
  • Notes: Grants the fudging as fact (complicates, not rejects) and reframes it as method rather than fraud; carries Wallace's own "Asshole Problem" self-critique (the State-Fair "animal-like" letter) as evidence the ethics were his ongoing subject, not a blind spot.

Themes

Reception and canonization (the sanctification into sainthood, the three cults, the cult-becoming-a-church); This Is Water and the self-help afterlife; the biography and the ethics of posthumous fame (the estate's non-consent, Franzen's contested death-reading); misogyny and the un-saintly writer (the gun story, the "asshole"/contempt reading); fiction vs. nonfiction as one project (the "giant floating eyeball" method, the fudged-facts revelation); irony and the "new sincerity" (EUP's prediction, the "garden of sad tomatoes"); style and its reception ("hysterical realism", the "gloriously alive" sentences).

Cross-references

Notable passages

Verbatim from the essay (curly quotes and dashes preserved).

  • "Nobody owns David Foster Wallace anymore."
  • "He has become a character, an icon, and in some circles a saint."
  • "the bard of ironic self-loathing transformed into a beacon of earnest self-help." … "The cult could become a church."
  • On This Is Water: the canonization "has been built out of his suffering" — a revival of "the Romantic picture of the depressive as a kind of keen-eyed saint."
  • The un-saintly line: "a jealous guy who once contemplated buying a gun to knock off a woman’s husband". And: "He’d probably be the last person to argue for his own sainthood."
  • "Of course, Wallace, too, wrote autofiction, but it was called journalism."
  • EUP: "he foresaw a new sincerity as the most viable direction for the generations of “anti-rebel” fiction writers raised on television’s corrosive irony."
  • The rescue: none of the arguments would matter "if the dead man’s sentences, written in what he liked to call “U.S. English,” weren’t still so gloriously alive."

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