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by
D.T. Max
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March 22 - March 28, 2023
But anxiety and the fear of anxiety were woven into his behavior by now too, and even as he tried to open himself up to the range of college experiences, he also protectively narrowed his life. He
He was familiar with his anxiety and may even have associated it with depression, but this was a more intense version of whatever he had routinely dealt with in high school; it was as if some switch in him had been flipped. He felt despair and thought of killing himself. He held on for a few weeks, trying to white-knuckle his way back to being himself.
They were not unfamiliar with suicidal depression: Sally’s sister and uncle had both taken their own lives.
“Any relationship that depends for its security on the proposition that monistic atomism has any relevance to post-Enlightenment conceptions of phenomenological reality is not worth saving,”
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,
Lot 49 was an agile and ironic metacommentary, and the effect on Wallace cannot be overstated (so much so that in a later letter to one of his editors Wallace, ever nervous of his
blame the breakdown on a sudden realization that he did not want to be a professor of logic, that he had “a kind of midlife crisis at twenty, which probably doesn’t augur real well for my longevity,”
Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations—“Uncle
he had a biological condition that was with him for the rest of his life. He couldn’t just ignore it. Though he shared his family’s worry that, as Amy says, “his potential as an autonomous adult was pretty much vaporizing,”
assures us that being medicated is not so bad. “They’re fine, really,” he claims of antidepressants, “but they’re fine in the same way that, say, living on another planet that was warm and comfortable and had food and fresh water would be fine: it would be fine, but it wouldn’t be good old Earth, obviously.”
along with a hope that love can rescue, a wispy hint that is quickly obliterated and will not appear in Wallace’s work again for many years.8
All this business about people committing suicide when they’re “severely depressed”; we say, “Holy cow, we must do something to stop them from killing themselves!” That’s wrong. Because all these people have, you see, by this time already killed themselves,
language mirrors reality, that the concept of an abstract thought is meaningless—words correspond to reality in the same way that a photograph corresponds to the thing photographed.
Language—and by extension thought—only had dominion over things of which we can have direct sensual knowledge. The Tractatus’s preface begins, “This book will perhaps be understood only by those who have themselves already thought the thoughts which are expressed in it—or similar thoughts.” If the Tractatus wasn’t calling out for him, nothing was.
Wallace’s fictional manuscript and the philosophy thesis were also of a piece: both asked whether language depicted the world or in some deeper way defined it and even altered it.
among them the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop
it came from the same sense, justified or not, that someone on whom he had deeply relied, had betrayed him. They had committed the crime of remaking his reality. Wallace held so fast to his sparse emotional certainties that when they proved unstable, the impact was crushing.
The professors were themselves mostly trained at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where such stories were the orthodoxy.
while potentially disgusting…is deeply important to what I perceive as a big subplot of the book, which is essentially a dialogue between Hegel and Wittgenstein on one hand and Heidegger and a contemporary French thinker-duo named Paul DeMan and Jacques Derrida on the other,
obsessed with certain problems that I think right now distill the experience of being human in a human community,”
The teacher was under constant pressure to entertain if he wanted to be liked—and no one wanted to be liked more than Wallace did.
“I mostly sit around smoking pot, cigarettes, worrying about not working, worrying about the tension between the worry and the absence of and action fuelled by that worry.”
that our obsession with being entertained has deadened our affect, that we are not, as a character warns in that book, choosing carefully enough what to love.
The American generation born after, say, 1955 is the first for whom television is something to be lived with, not just looked at. Our parents regard the set rather as the Flapper did the automobile: a curiosity turned treat turned seduction. For us, their children, TV’s as much a part of reality as Toyotas and gridlock. We quite literally cannot “imagine” life without it.
Wallace allowed that some critics might see minimalism or postmodernism as attempts to escape the prison of modern television-shaped reality, but he argued forcefully that they were each too limited to solve the problem:
It was not easy for him to accept humbling adages like “Your best thinking got you here.”
At twenty-six, Wallace was home for the fourth time after a breakdown. He was bitter and humiliated and felt as if his life was over.
The four weeks Wallace spent at McLean in November 1989 changed his life.
“Give me a little time to get used to no recreational materials and wearing a polyester uniform and living with 4 tattooed ex-cons and I’ll be right as rain,”
“logical validity is not a guarantee of truth.”
recovery defined an alcoholic as anyone who drank heavily and denied he was an alcoholic, which made believing you weren’t an alcoholic a symptom of the disease, whether you were or not.
He had been hypothesizing beforehand about a nation in thrall to its appetites, and here he was living among its casualties. So in the midst of his misery, he was alive to the new information he was getting.
Big Craig. Big Craig—Don Gately in the novel—was one of the Granada House supervisors and sometimes the house cook. He
TV’s treacly predictability held him in strange thrall, and during periods of collapse he seemed almost literally attached to it.
centerless pop-culture country full of marginalized subnations that are themselves postmodern, looped, self-referential, self-obsessed, voyeuristic, passive, slack-jawed, debased.
in early November 1991, Wallace suddenly collapsed again. It was his first breakdown since quitting drinking, and it devastated him. He was admitted to the Newton-Wellesley Hospital psychiatric unit with a diagnosis of suicidal depression.
The subject of the essay had expanded from how television changes our perception of reality to the crisis in the generation of which Wallace was a part, the two being, of course, to him, closely related. Since Arizona, Wallace had been calling for a fiction that captured how thoroughly television had altered the minds of its watchers.
America was, Wallace now knew, a nation of addicts, unable to see that what looked like love freely given was really need neurotically and chronically unsatisfied.
“Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time, it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy the cage.”
irony was defeatist, timid, the telltale of a generation too afraid to say what it meant, and so in danger of forgetting it had anything to say.
Suddenly, in his eyes, sincerity was a virtue and saying what you meant a calling.
who have the childish gall actually to endorse single-entrendre principles. Who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue.
The new rebels might be the ones willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the “how banal.”
…when in fact inside Hal there’s pretty much nothing at all, he knows.
but also the self-centeredness at the heart of therapy and recovery, a world where the self is so damaged that nothing else can get near it. Character
(Ultimately the priest told him he had too many questions to be a believer, and he let the issue drop.)
“If words are all we have as world and god, we must treat them with care and rigor: we must worship.”
“The obvious fact that the kids don’t Want to Write so much as Want to Be Writers makes their letters so depressing.”
What made Americans so obsessed with entertainment? Could whatever void they were trying to plug ever be filled?
He was making a clear statement about the purpose of fiction. If the heart throbbed, who cared what the head did?
