Getting Away From It All: The Literary Journalism of David Foster Wallace and Nietzsche's Concept of Oblivion

TL;DR

A Literary Journalism Studies article (2009) that reads Wallace's nonfiction — not Infinite Jest — as literary journalism, and argues that the whole of it is best understood through Nietzsche's concept of "oblivion," the mind's "active screening device" that keeps most of what we take in from reaching consciousness. Roiland's thesis is that Wallace suffered from an absence of oblivion: a surfeit of consciousness that made him a great journalist (endlessly curious, unable to let anything go) and also caused him great anguish. The organizing trope of the journalism is escape, which for Wallace was "tantamount to sadness": the fairgoers, cruise passengers, and lobster-eaters of his three vacation essays all achieve happiness by going unconscious — by letting oblivion "close the door" on awareness — while Wallace, constitutionally unable to dissociate, is doubly burdened (troubled both by their unconsciousness and by the excess of his own). Roiland tracks the same paradox through the tennis journalism (top athletes succeed precisely by suspending consciousness, which is also why they can say nothing meaningful about their gift) and through the footnotes, which he reads as the formal embodiment of Wallace's "inability to be done with anything" — "remnants of his consciousness that he cannot part with." Against the critics who called Wallace a postmodern ironist, Roiland insists his nonfiction is "decidedly not postmodern, ironic, or avant garde" but "linear, realistic, and, most importantly, earnest" — a modernist who laments fragmentation rather than celebrating it, an "old-fashioned moralist in postmodern disguise all along" (one critic's label, via Roiland — who argues the disguise was as much the critics' projection), bound to the reader by a "rigorous contract" of honesty and "unblinkingness". The essay closes on the two words it says "resonate for Wallace more than any other: infinite and oblivion" — the endless competing with the need to forget — and, reading the state-fair essay's revised ending as a darkly foreshadowing image (Wallace closing his eyes at the skycoaster, "the only sure way to obliterate all"), frames "the insufferable paradox of Wallace's philosophical worldview: It is imperative to be conscious, but to be conscious is to be impaired."

Key claims

• Wallace wrote literary journalism, and its defining feature is a "consciousness on the page". No reviews or obituaries called his magazine stories literary journalism, but he wrote squarely in that tradition (Sims: literary journalists "recognize the need for a consciousness on the page through which the objects in view are filtered"). Wallace "was awash in this consciousness"; it "compelled him to be curious and caused him to chronicle nearly everything he encountered."
• The best lens on his journalism is Nietzsche's "oblivion." Roiland reads the work through The Genealogy of Morals' second essay, where oblivion is "an active screening device" that keeps digested experience from emerging "into consciousness any more than what we ingest physically" — a psychic "concierge" whose job is "to shut temporarily the doors and windows of consciousness". Wallace "suffered from an absence of oblivion". As a journalist "Wallace's job was to collect and organize the noise and agitation of the phenomenal world."
• The organizing trope of the vacation essays is escape, which for Wallace was "tantamount to sadness." Pornography, politics, sports, and vacations are each "sad" because each "involve[s] supplanting everyday reality with fantasy". A vacation's point "is to escape the everyday, to be oblivious to the attendant concerns and responsibilities of daily life, which is something Wallace is both unwilling and unable to do." So mass tourists strike him as "alien, ignorant, greedy" — and "To get away from it all is to abdicate a moral responsibility, to dire effect."
• The vacationers achieve happiness by going unconscious. Fairgoers dissolve into a "herd-like" community; cruise passengers are infantilized "to a preconscious state" by "Managed Fun" and mistake pampering for compassion; lobster-eaters "lose their class consciousness." The vacations' very structure "discourages awareness" ("not even the dreadful corrosive action of your own adult consciousness and agency and dread can fuck up your fun"). Wallace, unable to join them, is "doubly burdened" — troubled both by their lack of consciousness and by the excess of his own (the 322-word "Professional Smile" footnote: "What a fucking mess").
• Tennis is the counter-case: oblivion is what lets athletes perform — and what keeps them mute about it. Wallace is "kind of awed by Joyce's evident ability to shut down lines of thinking that aren't to his advantage"; his own junior tennis was "my initiation into true adult sadness" because he "lacked Joyce's ability to close out all distractions". Conversely, "blindness and dumbness" are not the price of great athletic gifts but "its essence" — which is why athletes can offer no meaningful insight into their achievements (and why Wallace "skewers" Tracy Austin).
• The footnotes are the formal embodiment of his excess consciousness. They are "remnants of his consciousness that he cannot part with," information "important, but not integral." Wallace told Charlie Rose footnotes "get very, very addictive and it's almost like having a second voice in your head"; Nietzsche's oblivion-less perfectionist "can't be done with anything," so "the footnotes exemplify Wallace's inability to be done with anything." (Roiland notes the same habit spans the fiction — Infinite Jest's 388 endnotes across ~96 pages, the "loose baggy monster.")
• Wallace's nonfiction is modernist and earnest, not postmodern or ironic. Though it shares the maximalist style and uses parody/pastiche, "the narratives are also linear, realistic, and, most importantly, earnest." Irony "widens that gulf between subjectivity and its object" and so is "an impediment" to literary journalism's goal (writing "stuff about what it feels like to live"). Placing Wallace with Thompson and Didion in Eason's modernist camp ("the modernist laments fragmentation, while the postmodernist celebrates it"), Roiland reads him as an "old-fashioned moralist in postmodern disguise" — though he argues the "disguise" was as much a projection by critics as a cloak.
• The reader-contract is the ethical core. Wallace's fidelity to the reader — casting himself as "complicit in culture," refusing easy mockery — is spelled out in the Fadiman letters: "form and honor a fairly rigorous contract with the reader, one that involves honesty and unblinkingness", including "the narrator's own schmuckiness, limitations, prejudices, foibles, screw-ups". (Roiland also notes Wallace's own admission to Lipsky that his journalism deploys "a certain persona ... a little stupider and schmuckier than I am.")
• The despair was there all along — his biographers misread the nonfiction. Against Lipsky ("The nonfiction writer was an impervious sun") and Max ("He never published a word about his own mental illness"), Roiland shows the depression plainly present: the cruise essay's whole section on feeling "suicidal" ("a weird yearning for death ... It's wanting to jump overboard"), the "life sick" aside, the Kafka joke that "our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home."
• The final paradox: infinite vs. oblivion. The two words that "resonate for Wallace more than any other" are "infinite and oblivion" — "warring themes that bookend his prose," "The endless, limitless, and immeasurable competing with the need to limit, close off, and forget. Infinite consciousness leads to an infinitesimal amount of oblivion." This is "the insufferable paradox of Wallace's philosophical worldview: It is imperative to be conscious, but to be conscious is to be impaired." Roiland ends on the revised state-fair ending — Wallace closing his eyes at the skycoaster to reach "the only sure way to obliterate all" — as "A foreshadow of a more lasting getaway, a more permanent oblivion."

Theories & evidence

THEORY: Wallace's nonfiction is best understood through Nietzsche's "oblivion" — he suffered an ABSENCE of it, a surfeit of consciousness that made him a great journalist and caused him great anguish; consciousness is at once a moral imperative and an affliction

• Crux: none (candidate: an "oblivion / excess-consciousness" reading of the nonfiction — the article's signature move, unheld by any existing slug; partial overlap with worship-attention on the attention-imperative side and with anhedonia/the despair lane on the affliction side)
• Stance: advances
• Evidence:
  • [S] The frame: Nietzsche's oblivion is "an active screening device, responsible for the fact that what we experience and digest psychologically does not, in the stage of digestion, emerge into consciousness" — a psychic "concierge" whose role is "to shut temporarily the doors and windows of consciousness". Wallace "suffered from an absence of oblivion," and "as a journalist, Wallace's job was to collect and organize the noise and agitation of the phenomenal world." (LJS p.90-91)
  • [S] The paradox stated: "This contradiction epitomizes the insufferable paradox of Wallace's philosophical worldview: It is imperative to be conscious, but to be conscious is to be impaired." (LJS p.99) And: "there can be no happiness, no serenity, no hope, no pride, no present, without oblivion" (Roiland quoting Nietzsche, LJS p.93).
  • [S] The title-word summary: "two words resonate for Wallace more than any other: infinite and oblivion. ... They are the warring themes that bookend his prose. The endless, limitless, and immeasurable competing with the need to limit, close off, and forget. Infinite consciousness leads to an infinitesimal amount of oblivion." (LJS p.99)
  • [author] The attention-imperative that grounds the reading — the Kenyon address: a liberal-arts education "means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience" (Roiland quoting This Is Water, LJS p.89).
• Notes: This is the article's organizing thesis and its genuinely distinctive contribution — an "oblivion / excess-consciousness" reading of the nonfiction that the archive does not currently hold under any slug. It is oeuvre/reception-scoped (nonfiction, not IJ). It shades into worship-attention (the Kenyon "choose what you pay attention to" imperative Roiland leans on) and into the despair/anhedonia lane (consciousness as affliction), but its Nietzschean framing is its own. Whether the candidate concept earns its own place or is carried by the attention-imperative and despair lanes remains an open question.

THEORY: The trope that structures Wallace's vacation journalism is escape, "tantamount to sadness" — the fairgoers, cruise passengers, and lobster-eaters achieve happiness only by going unconscious, an abdication of moral responsibility Wallace himself cannot perform

• Crux: pampering-to-death (supports — the cruise "Managed Fun"/infantilizing reading); candidate: an "escape-trope / vacation-as-sadness" concept if the driver finds none held (adjacent to geographic-cure but distinct)
• Stance: advances
• Evidence:
  • [S] "the trope that structures these stories is escape, which, for Wallace, was tantamount to sadness." All the vacation subjects "involve supplanting everyday reality with fantasy". A vacation's point "is to escape the everyday, to be oblivious to the attendant concerns and responsibilities of daily life, which is something Wallace is both unwilling and unable to do." "To get away from it all is to abdicate a moral responsibility, to dire effect." (LJS p.91-92)
  • [S] The pampering reading: cruise passengers "get away from their landlocked worries via onboard pampering and 'Managed Fun,' which infantilizes them to a preconscious state"; they "mistake pampering for actual human compassion, and, worse, are never satisfied with the amount of indulgences they receive." (LJS p.92)
  • [author] Wallace on the engineered pleasure: "They'll micromanage every iota of every pleasure-option so that not even the dreadful corrosive action of your own adult consciousness and agency and dread can fuck up your fun. Your troublesome capacities for choice, error, regret, dissatisfaction, and despair will be removed from the equation." (Roiland quoting "A Supposedly Fun Thing," LJS p.92)
  • [text] The sadness catalogue Roiland anchors: "There is something about a mass-market Luxury Cruise that's unbearably sad"; "Midwest junior tennis was also my initiation into true adult sadness"; "Modern politicians make us sad, hurt us deep down in ways that are hard even to name, much less talk about." (Roiland's essay cites, LJS p.91)
• Notes: The "Managed Fun"/pampering-infantilizes-to-a-preconscious-state material is a clean secondary sighting for pampering-to-death (whose primary co-sources are asft-cruise-essay and asft-state-fair — the very essays Roiland reads). The larger escape-as-sadness-as-abdicated-consciousness trope is Roiland's own synthesis across the three vacation essays; it is adjacent to geographic-cure (moving/going-away as a false remedy) but not the same claim.

CONNECTION: The footnotes are the formal embodiment of Wallace's excess consciousness — "remnants of his consciousness that he cannot part with," the sign of a mind that "can't be done with anything"; the habit spans the nonfiction and the fiction alike

• Crux: endnotes-function (mentions — the IJ endnotes named as the same habit, but read here for the nonfiction footnotes, not as IJ architecture)
• Stance: mentions
• Evidence:
  • [S] "By designating them as notes, he not only complicates the narrative story structure, but he also indicates that they are pieces of information that are important, but not integral. In other words, remnants of his consciousness that he cannot part with." (LJS p.94)
  • [S] Via Nietzsche's oblivion-less perfectionist (who exhibits "active not wishing to be done with it"): "the footnotes exemplify Wallace's inability to be done with anything." (LJS p.94)
  • [author] Wallace to Charlie Rose: footnotes "get very, very addictive and it's almost like having a second voice in your head." (Roiland's cite, LJS p.94)
  • [text] The fiction cross-count Roiland notes: "the three hundred eighty-eight endnotes in his novel Infinite Jest span ninety-six pages," which led Kakutani to quote Henry James calling the novel a "loose baggy monster." (LJS p.103, endnote 49)
• Notes: The clearest IJ contact point in the article — but glancing. Roiland's subject is the nonfiction footnote-as-consciousness; the IJ endnotes are named only as the same authorial tic scaled up. Log as an endnotes-function mention (the footnotes-are-addictive-second-voice datum and the fiction/nonfiction continuity), not as an IJ-architecture reading — the archive's endnotes-function lane is about the endnotes' designed function within IJ, which Roiland does not argue.

CONNECTION: Wallace's nonfiction is modernist and earnest, not postmodern or ironic — irony impedes literary journalism's goal, and Wallace binds himself to the reader by a "rigorous contract" of honesty and self-implication

• Crux: sincerity-definition (supports — earnestness/moralism over irony); eup-connection (mentions — the "E Unibus Pluram" irony argument quoted); nonfiction-persona (supports — the reader-contract and the constructed "stupider and schmuckier" persona)
• Stance: supports
• Evidence:
  • [S] "Wallace's nonfiction is decidedly not postmodern, ironic, or avant garde. Although it does share the same maximalist writing style as his fiction ... the narratives are also linear, realistic, and, most importantly, earnest." Roiland places him in Eason's modernist camp: "the modernist laments fragmentation, while the postmodernist celebrates it." (LJS p.95)
  • [author] The anti-irony (from "E Unibus Pluram"): irony is "not a rhetorical mode that wears well" because it "serves an almost exclusively negative function. It's critical and destructive; a ground clearing.... But irony's singularly unuseful when it comes to constructing anything to replace the hypocrisies it debunks." (Roiland's cite, LJS p.94-95)
  • [author] The self-placement (Italy 2006): "using postmodern techniques, postmodern aesthetic but using that to discuss or represent very old traditional human verities ... using postmodern formal techniques for very traditional ends" — which prompts one critic's "old-fashioned moralist in postmodern disguise all along." (LJS p.95)
  • [author] The reader-contract (Fadiman letters): "form and honor a fairly rigorous contract with the reader, one that involves honesty and unblinkingness ... a narrator who's primarily engaged in trying to Tell the Truth ... [even] the narrator's own schmuckiness, limitations, prejudices, foibles, screw-ups". Plus the Lipsky admission that his journalism creates "a certain persona ... a little stupider and schmuckier than I am." (LJS p.95-96, p.104 n.66)
• Notes: Three oeuvre-scoped supports at once. sincerity-definition gets the earnest-moralist-not-ironist placement (Roiland argues the ironist label is a "caricature" that "conflates style with content"). eup-connection gets a mention via the EUP irony argument quoted (irony as negative/ground-clearing, unuseful for construction). nonfiction-persona gets the reader-contract and the direct author-side "stupider and schmuckier" persona admission — a datum that sits inside the archive's large nonfiction-persona lane (which already holds the same Lipsky register). The Italy 2006 self-placement quote is the one already print-cited to Roiland 2009 in video-italy-2006.

CONNECTION: The despair was present in the nonfiction all along — Wallace's biographers (Lipsky, Max) misread it as absent; the journalism was Wallace "peeling back my skull"

• Crux: anhedonia (mentions — the oeuvre despair/depression register, here in the nonfiction); candidate: a nonfiction-persona-adjacent "life-and-work-continuous" datum (A. O. Scott)
• Stance: mentions
• Evidence:
  • [S] Against Lipsky ("The nonfiction writer was an impervious sun") and Max ("He never published a word about his own mental illness"), Roiland: "it is inaccurate to say that his depression was not apparent in Wallace's nonfiction." (LJS p.97)
  • [author] The cruise essay's despair section: "a weird yearning for death combined with a crushing sense of my own smallness and futility that presents as a fear of death.... It's wanting to jump overboard." (Roiland quoting "A Supposedly Fun Thing," LJS p.97-98)
  • [author] The continuity of life and work (A. O. Scott, whom Roiland endorses): "his personality is stamped on every page—so much so that the life and the work can seem not just connected but continuous"; and Wallace to Lipsky: "The Harper's pieces were me peeling back my skull. You know, welcome to my mind for 20 pages, see through my eyes." (LJS p.97)
• Notes: A mention-grade sighting for the oeuvre-wide anhedonia/despair lane, scoped to the nonfiction (distinct from IJ's hal-condition). Roiland reads Wallace as un-hidden ("Wallace, in fact, did little to hide it"), directly contra the social-self/private-self split Lipsky drew. No IJ claim; log the despair-in-the-nonfiction datum and the life/work-continuous framing, don't over-route.

Themes

Literary journalism as a genre (Sims's "consciousness on the page"; Hartsock's "narrow the distance between subjectivity and the object"; Forde's Deweyian "pragmatic truth"; the "service essay"); Nietzsche's oblivion (the "active screening device"; the psychic "concierge"; oblivion as the precondition of "happiness ... serenity ... present"); consciousness as imperative and as affliction (the "insufferable paradox"; "infinite and oblivion" as warring themes); the escape trope (vacations as sadness; mass tourism as abdicated consciousness; "Managed Fun" and the preconscious state); tennis and the mute gift (oblivion as the athlete's engine and his silence; "blindness and dumbness" as "essence"); the footnote as excess consciousness ("remnants ... he cannot part with"; "a second voice in your head"; the inability to be "done with anything"); irony vs. earnestness (EUP's irony critique; modernist not postmodernist; the "old-fashioned moralist"); the reader-contract (honesty and "unblinkingness"; complicity in culture; the "stupider and schmuckier" persona); despair and the life/work continuum (the cruise "suicidal" section; Kafka's "journey toward home is ... our home"; the biographers' misreading); attention and worship (the Kenyon "This is water"; "Everybody worships"; the "default setting").

Cross-references

• video-italy-2006 — already cites "Roiland 2009 (LJS)" as the print carrier for the Italy self-placement formula ("using postmodern formal techniques for very traditional ends"); this note is that carrier's fuller home (the formula prints at LJS p.95, unhyphenated "postmodern").
• cohen-konstantinou-legacy-of-dfw — registers Roiland's later anthology chapter (The Legacy of David Foster Wallace, pp. 25-52, "literary journalism via Nietzsche's oblivion"; Konstantinou's "No Bull" borrows the denial-as-oblivion point) — an expansion of this article's argument.
• asft-cruise-essay / asft-state-fair / dfw-consider-the-lobster-gourmet — the three vacation essays Roiland reads as the escape trope; the cruise + fair are the co-sources for pampering-to-death, which Roiland's "Managed Fun" reading seconds.
• asft-michael-joyce / asft-derivative-sport — the tennis journalism (Joyce's ability "to shut down lines of thinking", the "true adult sadness" of junior tennis) Roiland uses for the oblivion-as-athletic-engine counter-case.
• this-is-water — the Kenyon address supplies Roiland's attention-imperative ("choose what you pay attention to"), the "Everybody worships" passage, and the "default setting."
• kcrw-bookworm-2006-lobster / kcrw-bookworm-1997-asft — the archive's audio lens on the same essays and on the nonfiction-persona question Roiland's reader-contract material feeds.

Accuracy notes

• Roiland cites the Illinois State Fair essay's collected title inconsistently: as "Getting Away From Already Being Pretty Much Away From It All" in the body and endnotes (its actual ASFT title) but once as "Getting Away From Pretty Much Already Being Away From It All" (a garbled word-order variant). Use the former.
• A minor typo: the Dostoevsky scholar is Joseph Frank (the endnote gets it right — "Joseph Frank's Dostoevsky"), but the body reads "Joseph Franks's five-book study."