The Dark Balloon

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Failing beautifully.

Wallace’s work will be seen as a huge failure, not in the pejorative sense, but in the special sense Faulkner used when he said about American novelists, “I rate us on the basis of our splendid failure to do the impossible.” Wallace failed beautifully. There is no mystery whatsoever about why he found this novel so hard to finish. The glimpse we get of what he wanted it to be—a vast model of something bland and crushing, inside of which a constellation of individual souls would shine in their luminosity, and the connections holding all of us together in this world would light up, too, like filaments—this was to be a novel on the highest order of accomplishment, and we see that the writer at his strongest would have been strong enough. He wasn’t always that strong.

John Jeremiah Sullivan writing for GQ.

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Thought-prophylaxis.

Rebekah Frumkin:

We willingly gave ourselves over to Wallace’s mind and personality—we devoured his output, and we wanted him to write more. We wondered what he had to say about basketball or antiabortion activists or the American Southwest. We felt welcome in his head. And Wallace wasn’t condescending. He bent over backward to help us understand what he was trying to say: he agonized over word choice, tried to explain away ambiguities with footnotes, and packed as much expository detail into every sentence as he possibly could. And ultimately it turned out that what he was trying to say wasn’t that complicated. We read Wallace with the attitude of a meek old man at a peep show, simultaneously marveling and shuddering at what was on display. We would never think of putting ourselves on display in the same way—we don’t even know how. But of course we couldn’t look away.

nods fervently, cries

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I wanna be a rebel.

David Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, on rebelling against postmodernism:

Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval. The old postmodern insurgents risked the gasp and squeal: shock, disgust, outrage, censorship, accusations of socialism, anarchism, nihilism. Today’s risks are different. The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the “Oh how banal.” To risk accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Of overcredulity. Of softness. Of willingness to be suckered by a world of lurkers and starers who fear gaze and ridicule above imprisonment without law.

♥

take me with you, i promise to keep quiet

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Inside.

David Foster Wallace on why Kafka is funny in a completely different way (PDF). (via Civil_Disobedient)

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W/r.

Despite his struggle, Wallace managed to keep teaching. He was dedicated to his students: He would write six pages of comments to a short story, joke with his class, fight them to try harder. During office hours, if there was a grammar question he couldn’t answer, he’d phone his mother. “He would call me and say, ‘Mom, I’ve got this student right here. Explain to me one more time why this is wrong.’ You could hear the student sort of laughing in the background. ‘Here’s David Foster Wallace calling his mother.’”

A great summary to a tragic life if you don’t know already who David Foster Wallace is. If you haven’t read any of his works, I recommend Oblivion: Stories—starting with the second story because the first develops slowly. Even if you disagree with how he writes, what he writes will click with you, deeply powerfully.