Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun

Update below

You all know how it is, when you hear a song and it just catches on with you, and you wind up listening to it a jillion times before it settles into the regular rotation of tunes that you cycle through. I had at least two of those songs this summer, that I came across randomly (one by means of a flukey Pandora station, the other from a mixtape a pal of mine made for a weekend trip to the Cape): “Coast to Coast,” by Elliott Smith, and “Change,” by Blind Melon. They’ve quite frankly been burning a hole in my iPod. They aren’t your prototypical boppin’ summer jams, but oh well. We don’t have a ton of control over the compelling things that come at us out of nowhere.

I mention this because it was a year ago yesterday that David Foster Wallace hanged himself, a sad event that set the stage for the renewed interest in his opus Infinite Jest, which regular readers of Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun will recall I just wrapped up. I didn’t realize this until a few days ago, but “Coast to Coast” and “Change,” songs that inexorably forced themselves onto my summer playlist, have the unfortunate coincidence of being recorded by artists who, like DFW, cut their own lives short: Smith from an apparently self-inflicted stab wound to the chest, and Blind Melon’s Shannon Hoon from a cocaine overdose.

I can’t lie, I was a little perturbed when this all became apparent to me. It’s a coincidence, but it’s a really weird one, and it got me thinking about how we deal when our favorite artists make a decision that they can’t take back. I’ll preface all this by saying that I’ve never had to deal with suicide personally; I can’t really even imagine what that would be like, and I kind of choose not to.

But the question of coping when the life of someone whose art we admire and love is cut short is one that I think a lot of us are familiar with. Any fan of Wallace or Smith or Cobain or Phoenix or Ledger knows what I’m talking about. Over at the Infinite Summer blog, guest writer John Moe, whose own brother committed suicide, discussed why he couldn’t bring himself to read IJ this summer. He brings up a few points that I wanted to address. Firstly is the issue of resentment. Moe writes:

I’m still upset at the author for being a thief. Ever been robbed? Like had your house burglarized and your stuff rummaged through and stolen? There’s this period right after it happens when you can’t believe that someone got into where you live, the space where you sleep and bathe and eat, and just took stuff you had bought and taken care of. David Foster Wallace hanged himself and robbed us of all the work he would have produced in the future. Our homes were stocked floor to ceiling with the promise of the best goddamn writing people could make and Wallace fucking ripped it off. I’m still walking around wanting to punch someone. Don’t bother calling the goddamn cops, they won’t do anything.

I promised not to write about the actual content of the book until the summer is over, so I’ll just say that the moment I finished Infinite Jest, I had the same reaction as John Moe. The specter hanging over the entire process of reading the book was “This is it. This is all there is.” Naturally, at the end, I became very conscious of the fact that David Foster Wallace wouldn’t be doing any more writing, and I felt cheated.

But I pretty quickly came to the conclusion that this is a pretty not healthy way to proceed. It’s clear that David Foster Wallace had a troubled inner life, and it may not mean anything at all for the dual reasons that 1) I didn’t know him and b) he’s dead, but it just didn’t feel right to pile on with my own enmity. And besides that, there’s no guarantee that Wallace would write anything worthwhile for the rest of his career, or anything at all.

I understand that argument is weak tea in the face of any given artist’s near-limitless potential, but you do what you can, especially when the even more uncomfortable truth is that David Foster Wallace, or any human that chooses to create or perform or compete in public for a living, doesn’t owe us a damn thing. As adoring fans, it’s a hard idea to come to grips with, but any individual’s motivations are his own. The sooner we accept that what our favorite artists produce are gifts and not entitlements, the better off, I think, we’ll be.

Something else Moe wrote caught my eye.

The thing is, when someone decides not to go to work one day and instead puts a bullet in their head, everything else they do is a prologue to that act. So every camping trip anecdote, every story told by a trucking company co-worker about Rick’s penchant for adopting injured animals, every joke shared by a fellow volunteer at the sobriety hotline where he dedicated his time, it all leads up to what he did and that’s how you understand it. Their lives read like a suicide note. The howl Kurt Cobain produces on “Where Did You Sleep Last Night?” from the Unplugged in New York album is terrifying to me, or would be if I could listen to Nirvana anymore. I picture every Wallace book I see on a shelf as being soaked in tears.

This is another tendency that I completely understand. I remember reading a piece about Cobain, where the writer said pretty much the same thing, that he was compelled to sift through Nirvana’s entire catalog, looking for clues that maybe someone could have picked up on, so that we could have known and maybe prevented what happened! Like I said, it’s a completely understandable compulsion, but in the end, I think it’s misguided.

Maira Kalman, in an illustrated post about Thomas Jefferson that I linked to a few months back, said this about Jefferson-as-slave-owner: “It’s a miserable part of the story, but it is not the whole story.” I think this is important to keep in mind in the case of DFW, especially since we have an inclination to interpret a narrative, or a life, through the lens of its ending. The completion of a story makes us feel that we can now look back and cobble together the various disparate pieces, to figure out how those pieces point toward the now-apparent conclusion.

But if David Foster Wallace the writer, and Infinite Jest the novel, taught us anything, it’s about the insufficiency of traditional narrative forms. Endings are important, but they don’t always tell us what we think they tell us, or what we want them to tell us. I personally refuse to look at his oeuvre as a chronicle of a depressed person’s descent, not only because I don’t think that was his intent, but also because it takes away from everything else we can get out of his work. The man himself once said “Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it’d find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it.” Or, in coarser but no less true words, “Fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being.” Wrapping ourselves up in what Wallace’s fiction says about what he chose/was driven to do handcuffs us into a really uninteresting and unilluminating pursuit. His suicide is tragic, and sad, and disappointing for many different reasons. It’s a miserable part of the story. But it isn’t the whole story.

Dangerous, Dirty, and Updated: I probably should have read A.O. Scott’s remembrance of Wallace from the Times Week in Review section shortly after his death, which he led off thusly:

Reviewing a biography of Jorge Luis Borges in The New York Times Book Review a few years back, David Foster Wallace attacked the standard biographical procedure of mining the lives of writers for clues to their work, and vice versa. Borges’s stories, he insisted, “so completely transcend their motive cause that the biographical facts become, in the deepest and most literal way, irrelevant.”

I kinda sorta said the same thing. Without the like, research. Oh well.