"A Literary Lion"
Published in Berkshire Eagle (9/21/08)
By Jeremy D. Goodwin
Writers are about as catty as they come on the topic of acknowledging influences. Nevertheless, I got to the point a few years ago when I stopped being cagey and started answering quickly and simply when anyone asked me to name my favorite writer: David Foster Wallace.
Since he committed suicide on September 12, the zeitgeist has been flooded with tributes to this giant of contemporary letters. Many admirers have attempted to summarize the heady swirl of DFW's writing style, kicking up linguistic sparks in a manner that inevitably reflected that of their subject.
I'll not take a shot at writing the definitive encapsulation of what his work meant. Instead, I'll go from the macrocosm to the microcosm, and talk simply of what he meant to me.
I didn't realize I had a hero until I started thinking about it in the wake of DFW's death—he has been an enormous inspiration and, creatively speaking at least, indeed my hero.
It was in early 1998, in a course on experimental fiction as an undergrad at The George Washington University, that I was introduced to his work. A 1,079-page novel (including 100 pages of endnotes) with its chapters arranged nonlinearly, and a hugely complicated story including an elite team of wheelchair-riding Canadian separatist assassins? On my end, talk about a heady brew of readerly glee and writerly anxiety of influence!
The inciting incident behind the story of Infinite Jest concerns an impossibly esoteric, experimental American filmmaker who somehow makes a film that is so entertaining, anyone who catches a glimpse of it is hurled into a hyper-satiated, catatonic state and eventually dies of general neglect. It is the suicide of this filmmaker that hovers over the whole book, particularly over his teenaged son, one of the book's principal characters.
"But you can't be Shakespeare and you can't be Joyce," Lou Reed sang in 1992, "so what is left instead?" For a fiction writer with my own particular aesthetic concerns, the question isn't how I can escape DFW's shadow but how to transcend it, how to make an original statement within the aesthetic parameters that he has already staked out. It's kind of like when a new rock band says they're influenced by the Beatles; it a superfluous comment, like saying your rock band is influenced by the discovery of electricity. DFW was running around with a key tied to a kite and he came home and everything has been different since.
Most of the posthumous talk concerns DFW's best-known novel, but it was the entirety and variety of his career that puts him in role model status for me. Two novels, three short-story collections, two collections of nonfiction pieces written for a wide range of publications, a book elucidating the mathematical concept of infinity for the general reader, a scholarly study of rap music…it seems his imagination, curiosity, and intellect had no bounds, and this is reflected in the richness of his professional output.
News of his death, by hanging, did not break widely until late the next night. Earlier that evening, I saw Hamlet at Shakespeare & Company. I was reminded of DFW for an obvious reason: the title of his masterpiece comes from the gravedigger scene, when Hamlet holds the skull of old Yorick and cries:
"I knew him, Horatio: a fellow
of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy: he hath
borne me on his back a thousand times..."
As I do whenever I happen to hear that line, I thought of DFW. I didn't know he was already dead.
In retrospect, a continual theme of his work is a consideration of everyday sadness, and how to transcend it. In his much-circulated commencement speech at Kenyon College in 2005, he said that the graduates' goal should be to escape their "default setting" of being "uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out." But of course we found a sense of connection through his work, not only with the silent author behind the blizzard of words but with our fellow readers--the community that a book creates.
But after all the words, we are left with that familiar question that is always asked of suicides: Why? He had such a close relationship with language and could seemingly make it do anything he wanted. In this final act, did he let the action speak alone?
It saddens me that DFW's manner of death will always be included in any short summary of his life and work. But though we'll never have a personal statement that will answer all the questions, I think it is quite enough to make do with his work. We have the words that did flow from his pen, and those were precious gifts indeed.
Writers are about as catty as they come on the topic of acknowledging influences. Nevertheless, I got to the point a few years ago when I stopped being cagey and started answering quickly and simply when anyone asked me to name my favorite writer: David Foster Wallace.
Since he committed suicide on September 12, the zeitgeist has been flooded with tributes to this giant of contemporary letters. Many admirers have attempted to summarize the heady swirl of DFW's writing style, kicking up linguistic sparks in a manner that inevitably reflected that of their subject.
I'll not take a shot at writing the definitive encapsulation of what his work meant. Instead, I'll go from the macrocosm to the microcosm, and talk simply of what he meant to me.
I didn't realize I had a hero until I started thinking about it in the wake of DFW's death—he has been an enormous inspiration and, creatively speaking at least, indeed my hero.
It was in early 1998, in a course on experimental fiction as an undergrad at The George Washington University, that I was introduced to his work. A 1,079-page novel (including 100 pages of endnotes) with its chapters arranged nonlinearly, and a hugely complicated story including an elite team of wheelchair-riding Canadian separatist assassins? On my end, talk about a heady brew of readerly glee and writerly anxiety of influence!
The inciting incident behind the story of Infinite Jest concerns an impossibly esoteric, experimental American filmmaker who somehow makes a film that is so entertaining, anyone who catches a glimpse of it is hurled into a hyper-satiated, catatonic state and eventually dies of general neglect. It is the suicide of this filmmaker that hovers over the whole book, particularly over his teenaged son, one of the book's principal characters.
"But you can't be Shakespeare and you can't be Joyce," Lou Reed sang in 1992, "so what is left instead?" For a fiction writer with my own particular aesthetic concerns, the question isn't how I can escape DFW's shadow but how to transcend it, how to make an original statement within the aesthetic parameters that he has already staked out. It's kind of like when a new rock band says they're influenced by the Beatles; it a superfluous comment, like saying your rock band is influenced by the discovery of electricity. DFW was running around with a key tied to a kite and he came home and everything has been different since.
Most of the posthumous talk concerns DFW's best-known novel, but it was the entirety and variety of his career that puts him in role model status for me. Two novels, three short-story collections, two collections of nonfiction pieces written for a wide range of publications, a book elucidating the mathematical concept of infinity for the general reader, a scholarly study of rap music…it seems his imagination, curiosity, and intellect had no bounds, and this is reflected in the richness of his professional output.
News of his death, by hanging, did not break widely until late the next night. Earlier that evening, I saw Hamlet at Shakespeare & Company. I was reminded of DFW for an obvious reason: the title of his masterpiece comes from the gravedigger scene, when Hamlet holds the skull of old Yorick and cries:
"I knew him, Horatio: a fellow
of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy: he hath
borne me on his back a thousand times..."
As I do whenever I happen to hear that line, I thought of DFW. I didn't know he was already dead.
In retrospect, a continual theme of his work is a consideration of everyday sadness, and how to transcend it. In his much-circulated commencement speech at Kenyon College in 2005, he said that the graduates' goal should be to escape their "default setting" of being "uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out." But of course we found a sense of connection through his work, not only with the silent author behind the blizzard of words but with our fellow readers--the community that a book creates.
But after all the words, we are left with that familiar question that is always asked of suicides: Why? He had such a close relationship with language and could seemingly make it do anything he wanted. In this final act, did he let the action speak alone?
It saddens me that DFW's manner of death will always be included in any short summary of his life and work. But though we'll never have a personal statement that will answer all the questions, I think it is quite enough to make do with his work. We have the words that did flow from his pen, and those were precious gifts indeed.
