"David Foster Wallace (1962-2008)" (George Saunders, Guardian 'writers' obituaries of the noughties')

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TL;DR

George Saunders's contribution to the Guardian's 2010 "writers' obituaries of the noughties" is a short, much-quoted tribute to David Foster Wallace centered not on any one book but on the effect of his prose. Reading Brief Interviews With Hideous Men on a plane, Saunders found himself moved to "terrified tenderness" — his mind "altered in the direction of compassion" by a "shock methodology" — and offers the memorial's signature characterizations: Wallace as "one of the sweetest, most generous people I've ever known", "a great American Buddhist writer, in the lineage of Whitman and Ginsberg", and above all "a wake-up artist" who "went around waking people up." It advances no reading of Infinite Jest specifically; its value is a reception testimony from a major peer about the empathetic, sincerity-driven aim readers ascribe to Wallace's whole project.

Key claims

Prose as a compassion machine. Reading Brief Interviews over the midwest, Saunders felt "agitated and flinchy, on the brink of tears"; the prose induced "a special variety of openness, that I might call terrified tenderness: a sudden new awareness of what a fix we're in on this earth, stuck in these bodies, with these minds." The alteration "seemed more spiritual than aesthetic": "my mind was being altered in the direction of compassion, by a shock methodology that was, in its subject matter, actually very dark."
The man matched the work. Saunders first met Wallace at a mutual friend's in Syracuse (Wallace in a "Mighty Mouse T-shirt"), and — dreading a Foucault-flavored humiliation — found him Chekhovian, defusing the tension by turning the talk to the guests: "He was about as open and curious and accepting a person as I'd ever met". "The person who had induced this complicated feeling was one of the sweetest, most generous people I've ever known."
The "wake-up artist" framing. "I see him as a great American Buddhist writer, in the lineage of Whitman and Ginsberg. He was a wake-up artist … he went around waking people up." Wallace was "a celebrationist, who gave us new respect for the world through his reverence for it," a reverence "that manifested as attention" and produced "that electrifying, all-chips-in, aware-in-all-directions prose of his."

Themes

The ethic of Wallace's fiction (compassion, empathy, sincerity as the point of the difficulty); prose and attention as spiritual practice; the reverence / "celebrationist" reading; the correspondence between Wallace's kindness in person and the effect of his work; peer-writer reception and mourning.

Cross-references

memorial-thepoint-death-is-not-the-end — the critical version of the same "therapeutic," compassion-inducing reading of Wallace's project (Baskin's Wittgensteinian therapy vs. Saunders's Buddhist "wake-up artist").
memorial-rollingstone-lipsky-lost-years-last-days-2008 and the other 2008-12 remembrance pieces — the peer/reader tributes to which Saunders's belongs; his is the prose-ethic one.
Wallace's essay E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction — the anti-irony/sincerity program Saunders's "wake-up artist" language celebrates in reception terms.

Notable passages

"The person who had induced this complicated feeling was one of the sweetest, most generous people I've ever known."
"terrified tenderness: a sudden new awareness of what a fix we're in on this earth, stuck in these bodies, with these minds."
"my mind was being altered in the direction of compassion, by a shock methodology that was, in its subject matter, actually very dark."
"I don't know much about Dave's spiritual life but I see him as a great American Buddhist writer, in the lineage of Whitman and Ginsberg."
"He was a wake-up artist" — "he went around waking people up."
"that electrifying, all-chips-in, aware-in-all-directions prose of his."