Death Is Not the End: David Foster Wallace, His Legacy and His Critics

TL;DR

Jon Baskin's "Death Is Not the End" — the inaugural essay in The Point (2009) — is one of the earliest and most influential serious readings of Wallace, and it reads Infinite Jest as the culmination of a single project: to rescue subjective consciousness from the "incredibly interesting dead ends" of postmodern irony by writing a fiction that is therapeutic in Wittgenstein's sense — "deep, significant conversation with another consciousness" that brings the reader "out of himself." On this reading the film "Infinite Jest" (a failed communication from father to son) and the novel Infinite Jest (Wallace's attempted successful communication with his readers) are structurally opposed; the novel's genuinely radical move is its "un-ironic assertion that Alcoholics Anonymous offers a series of wisdoms about life", an "irony-free zone" set against Hal's hyper-self-conscious cage. The essay closes with a diagnosis of Wallace's hostile reception (Kakutani, A.O. Scott, James Wood) as itself a symptom of the authenticity/fraudulence neurosis Wallace anatomized. It advances several IJ readings with textual and author-statement evidence.

Key claims

• The project. Wallace "labored to return literary fiction to the deep problems of subjective experience", against a postmodern consensus that "there were no longer any subjects." He belongs less with Eggers and Franzen than "with Dostoevsky and Joyce."
• Fiction as therapeutic conversation. Wallace said great fiction engaged its reader in "deep, significant conversation with another consciousness"; Baskin ties this to Wallace's "primary intellectual influence, Wittgenstein" — the Philosophical Investigations' method of dialogue and "different therapies" for the confusions "intrinsic to his reader's language and way of life."
• The film vs. the novel. In IJ, the film "Infinite Jest" is the father's attempt to bring Hal "out of himself"; it fails by being "too entertaining, immediately paralyzing its viewer with insatiable desire." Baskin reads the novel as the transformation of that "failed communication" into "what the author hoped would be a successful communication with his readers".
• AA as the un-ironic answer. "The truly radical thing about the book is Wallace's un-ironic assertion that Alcoholics Anonymous offers a series of wisdoms about life"; the Recovery Center is an "irony-free zone" of openhearted sharing, and "Wallace, however, was the first to propose it as a solution to the problem of postmodern thinking" — a problem that, Baskin says, "had the structure of addiction."
• Hal's condition as self-consciousness terminus. Hal's opening incoherence (thought severed from expression) is "the logical terminus of a hyper self-consciousness that transforms the head into a cage"; his "anhedonia" and Gately's late revelation that "everything unendurable was in the head" are the two poles of the diagnosis.
• IJ as counterstatement. "Consolidating and expanding upon Wallace's early criticisms of irony and alienation as ends-in-themselves, Jest emerges as a powerful counterstatement against what he perceived to be" the naïveté of the postmodern project — the program of "E Unibus Pluram" executed in fiction.
• The reception as symptom. Kakutani's "word machine," A.O. Scott's "fast-fading pyrotechnics … impressive in the manner of a precocious child's performance at a dinner party," and James Wood's "hysterical realism" are read as the authenticity/fraudulence anxiety Wallace's whole oeuvre diagnoses; Eggers (in the tenth-anniversary introduction) says we keep reading IJ "because we're interested in genius."

Theories & evidence

THEORY: Infinite Jest is the therapeutic anti-Entertainment — the novel is the successful, sincere communication that the film "Infinite Jest" fails to be

• Crux: book-as-entertainment
• Stance: advances
• Evidence:
  • [secondary] Baskin: "The father's failed communication with his son" — the film — "is transformed into what the author hoped would be a successful communication with his readers": the novel. [essay sec. III]
  • [author] Wallace's stated aim, quoted: great fiction is "deep, significant conversation with another consciousness", read against his Wittgensteinian model of writing as therapy. [essay sec. I]
  • [text] The Recovery Center as an "irony-free zone" of openhearted sharing — the novel's structural answer to Hal's cage (scene 166's "everything unendurable was in the head" is the revelation the AA thread delivers).
• Notes: This is the affirmative, IJ-is-its-own-antidote leg of the book-as-samizdat family — the novel performs the sincere communication its fictional film cannot. No in-essay counter-position; Baskin himself raises the exposure that the stance could be faulted as "reactionary dogmatism" (his late-Tolstoy comparison) and speaks of its "full radicality--or conservatism, depending on your point of view" — a self-aware hedge, not a denial.

THEORY: Infinite Jest executes E Unibus Pluram's program — a counterstatement to postmodern irony, with AA's un-ironic sincerity as the radical answer

• Crux: eup-connection
• Stance: advances
• Evidence:
  • [secondary] "Jest emerges as a powerful counterstatement against what he perceived to be" the naïveté of the postmodern project, consolidating and expanding upon Wallace's early criticisms of irony and alienation. [essay sec. II]
  • [secondary] "The truly radical thing about the book is Wallace's un-ironic assertion that Alcoholics Anonymous offers a series of wisdoms about life" — and "Wallace, however, was the first to propose it as a solution to the problem of postmodern thinking." [essay sec. III]
  • [author] The E.U.P. thesis, quoted: a once-subversive irony "no longer qualified as an appropriate challenge" once the culture had assimilated it; the essay reads IJ as the fiction that answers that manifesto.
• Notes: Directly connects IJ's execution to the E.U.P. diagnosis (the crux's definition). Counter-texture recorded per the counterevidence clause: Baskin stresses that IJ does NOT eschew irony — critics who found "plenty of irony and cynicism" in Wallace missed that he thought irony had to be "acknowledge[d]… in and through his fiction", a means not an end.

THEORY: The film "Infinite Jest" was made as communication (to bring Hal "out of himself") and is lethal precisely by being too effective an entertainment

• Crux: entertainment-purpose
• Stance: endorses
• Evidence:
  • [text] The film was meant as a "magically entertaining toy to dangle at the infant still somewhere alive in the boy," to bring Hal "out of himself" — JOI's communicative, paternal intent (scene 162, pp. 827-845). [essay sec. III]
  • [secondary] It "turns out to be too entertaining, immediately paralyzing its viewer with insatiable desire" — lethality as the failure mode of an over-successful communication, not a sci-fi weapon (entertainment-lethality adjacency). [essay sec. III]
• Notes: Reads JOI's purpose on the communication side of the communication-vs-weapon question (the film is a father's message, weaponized by the A.F.R. only after the fact). The lethality gloss — entertainment perfected past the point of survivability — is a reading of how it kills, not a proposal of a new mechanism.

THEORY: Hal's breakdown is the terminus of hyper-self-consciousness — the head becomes a cage — not (or not only) a drug event

• Crux: hal-condition
• Stance: advances
• Evidence:
  • [secondary] Hal's opening inability to make himself understood is "the logical terminus of a hyper self-consciousness that transforms the head into a cage." [essay sec. III]
  • [text] Hal's "anhedonia" — a "kind of spiritual torpor in which one loses the ability to feel pleasure" (scene 134, 135, pp. 692ff) — as the affective form of the same condition. [essay sec. IV]
• Notes: A thematic (self-consciousness) reading of hal-condition; the essay offers no DMZ mechanism and does not engage the hal-dmz question at all — its account is diagnostic-thematic, not pharmacological. Recorded as the source frames it (cite-as-written), not adjudicated.

Themes

Irony versus sincerity and the New Sincerity project; therapy and Wittgenstein (fiction as conversation, "different therapies"); addiction as the millennial condition and AA as its treatment; self-consciousness, solipsism, and loneliness; authenticity and fraudulence (the reception neurosis); the ethical purpose of difficult fiction.

Cross-references

• gc-ep040-greg-carlisle-elegant-complexity — this essay's book-as-antidote and JOI-purpose readings sit alongside the theories about what the Entertainment is and what the novel does with it.
• Wallace's essay "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction" — the manifesto whose program Baskin argues IJ executes.
• dtmax-2009-the-unfinished — the D.T. Max reporting on The Pale King and boredom that Baskin cites.
• observer-leyner-remembers-dfw-2008 — the same E.U.P. anti-irony argument, there via its named target (Leyner).
• Scene anchors: the Kate Gompert "It" passage (scene 135, pp. 692-698); JOI's film-intent and Hal's anhedonia (scene 162, pp. 827-845; scene 134, 135); Gately's "everything unendurable was in the head" (scene 166, pp. 854-864).

Notable passages

• On the project: Wallace "labored to return literary fiction to the deep problems of subjective experience."
• On fiction's aim (quoting Wallace): great fiction is "deep, significant conversation with another consciousness".
• On AA: "The truly radical thing about the book is Wallace's un-ironic assertion that Alcoholics Anonymous offers a series of wisdoms about life."
• On the film: "crafted by Hal's father turns out to be too entertaining, immediately paralyzing its viewer with insatiable desire."
• On Hal: "the logical terminus of a hyper self-consciousness that transforms the head into a cage."
• IJ text the essay reproduces — Kate Gompert's depression as "It": "It is an unnumb intuition in which the world is fully rich and animate" (scene 135).
• Wallace on his subject (quoted): "anomie and solipsism and a peculiarly American loneliness: the prospect of dying without once having loved something more than yourself."