Yesterday I finally started reading Infinite Jest, about two months after ordering it off Amazon. Or rather I got through the foreword and two pages of the actual book before falling asleep. Part of me is thrilled at the thought of being seen with it in public - to have someone recognise the book and make assumptions about me as a reader and a person based on the fact I am someone who ostensibly reads David Foster Wallace 1 but I'm also aware that if I saw someone carrying around a copy of Infinite Jest on the train platform or on the bus, I would (1) initially be thrilled and very willing to converse and get to know that person, but also (2) immediately assume that person doesn't know DFW like I do - that they haven't established a relationship with the author as "profound" and "meaningful" as I have - that they've picked up Infinite Jest simply because it's popular or trendy - that they hadn't read his short stories, hadn't read his essays on cruise ships and tennis players, hadn't spent an unconscionable amount of time watching old tv interviews of him wincing and grimacing on youtube, hadn't read multiple interpretations of what his work meant to other people, hadn't trawled through the internet for eyewitness accounts of what kind of guy he was in person, and for biographical reports of his personal life and of the circumstances surrounding and leading up to his sudden apparent suicide, hadn't listened to an interview of his sister talking about growing up with Dave Wallace and what their parents were like.
I'm aware that it's cynical but it's also logical. I mean, what are the odds that someone would be just now reading a book that came out 20 years ago unless it had something to do with the silver screen portrayal of its author that just came out called the End of the Tour, starring Jason Segel as David Foster Wallace and Jesse Eisenberg as Jesse Eisenberg.
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I watched the End of the Tour today, on a whim. The fact that my final exams are in a month's time might have something to do with this. And for the record I liked the film. I didn't expect to enjoy it as much as I did. To be honest, I had mixed feelings when I first found out it was being released. A friend of mine had sent me the link to the trailer, and my immediate reaction was this: 'Oh man, he would've hated this.'
The underlying assumption is that David Foster Wallace, if he were still alive today, would never have willingly agreed to a movie portrayal of himself. I mean, the type of person who has misgivings about being interviewed for a magazine and begrudgingly attends literary readings probably isn't the kind of person who is going to be ecstatic about having a major motion picture film made about them. That was my thought - and the David Foster Wallace estate who in fact openly opposed the production of the film probably thought the same. David Foster Wallace admits over the course of the film that there is a part of him that wants fame and recognition for his work - that he wants to be lauded and praised and rewarded - but it's that very same knowledge that makes him nervous and uneasy about courting fame. Because he knows how susceptible he is to it, he fears that he'll become addicted to it - that he'll grow accustomed to the blinding brightness and artificial warmth of the spotlight of recognition. And he hates the idea of being seen as someone like that. He states in various ways throughout the film that he has a fear of being a certain way, that he'd hate to one day look at himself in the mirror and think - what an absolute phony.
But I knew I was going to watch it. By the first 10 seconds of the trailer I had already made up my mind. I was interested in the man, in a very fervent and odd, bordering-on-obsessive way - the way you usually reserve for female celebrities blessed with exquisite bone structure who appear on late night talk shows with impossibly lustrous hair flaunting slender hairless appendages.2 I had been unwittingly nurturing over the last year a quietly overzealous fascination with and sense of respect for David Foster Wallace.
I had my own doubts about the film of course, like if you heard a movie was going to be made about your older brother, or an uncle of yours who you really liked but who was also notoriously reclusive and camera shy - you'd want to know who the actor playing them was and you'd be justifiably suspicious of the possibility that they might turn him into a caricature. You worry that they'll reduce him to a set of mannerisms and tics and idiosyncrasies. The bandanna, the small-town demeanour, the Midwestern inflection. It's that thing where the more intimately you know / knew a person the more apprehension and trepidation you feel when you hear they're going to be posthumously represented in some way, because the more truly special something is, the harder it is to capture, to pin down and package all pretty. You hope as well as pessimistically doubt that they'll stay faithful to the real person. After having watched the movie, I can safely say, from my point of view at least, that the David Foster Wallace portrayed on screen by Jason Segel is pretty darn faithful and believable.
In the film, he's essentially hounded / interrogated / tortured by this less-famous and accolade-hungry, tape recorder-toting younger version of himself over the course of four days, and it is out of this period of prolonged discomfort that the transcripts for Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself came into being.3 As a deeply personal and privileged peek into what it would be like to spend 4 days with the author of Infinite Jest in 1996, the book is an amazingly nuanced insight into what was going on inside his head at the time and an unprecedented vehicle for wish fulfilment for DFW-nerds and fanatics everywhere. Without that willingness to antagonize and mortify DFW the person, we would never have the book, and the book is not a bad thing at all. Pop quiz: Which is the lesser of two evils? To leave a brilliant author alone according to his wishes and deprive the world of a great film, or to make a great film about him even though you're pretty sure it will upset him. There's a line in the film where David Foster Wallace says, 'this is a brilliant tactic on your part. Get me a little pissed off, get me to lower my guard, and I'll reveal more.'
There's a scene in the film that may provide a clue into understanding Dave Wallace's phobia of / hypervigilance against indulging one's ego. He talks about how junk food and masturbation aren't inherently wrong, but it's only if you overindulge that it becomes an issue of health. He predicts a future where entertainment becomes so seductive and pleasurable and available that it becomes impossible to escape it - that every fibre of your being just wants to engage in it 24-7. Similarly, it's not wrong to want to be praised, but it's wrong if that becomes your sole reason for living. If your life revolves around it, or if you become obsessed with it, and every single thing you do or thought you have is driven by the desire to have your ego stroked - or as Dave elegantly puts it, to get your dick sucked.
Here's the thing, I don't think DFW's reaction would've been as unequivocal and straightforward as pure revulsion / aversion to the film. I'm sure it'd be in there, and would probably form a large part of his gut-level immediate visceral response. But I don't think that's the whole story. It doesn't take into account the part that he admits to harbouring and being profoundly suspicious and wary of, the part that would be thrilled by the attention and adoration that birthed the endeavour.4 It doesn't consider the part of ourselves that wants desperately to be loved, that wants to be seen for who we are and be accepted in spite of it, which is not abnormal or unhealthy at all. It's part and parcel of being a human being, and to deny that would be to deny part of your own humanity. When DFW talks about feeling lonely and wishing he were married sometimes, it hints at the idea that fame may elevate a person but in fact does nothing to mitigate or alleviate this feeling. That it in fact often does the opposite and exacerbates this profound unfulfilled desire to be loved - which results in feeling even more isolated and alienated and lonely than before. Feeling that there's something essential and vital and massive missing from our lives. Feeling this deep-down gut-spiritual feeling that we're so desperate not to feel, that we try to drown it out with junk food and sex and alcohol and mind-numbingly good commercial entertainment.
There are a bunch of clever and very intellectually sophisticated articles, some of them written by people who knew David Foster Wallace personally, warning against the tendency to canonise or romanticise the preternaturally talented and prematurely departed. They foresaw that people would want to paint Dave as some kind of literary martyr or turn him into a kind of cult figurehead. They claim that that's precisely the kind of idol worship Dave would've condemned. DFW says in an interview somewhere how when you become an icon or a symbol or an ideal you lose the ability to relate to people in a real and meaningful way. When I heard that there was a movie coming out, I automatically and in retrospect quite cynically assumed they weren't going to get it right - that the film would undoubtedly cast him as some kind of icon or symbol or ideal. That it'd be impossible for them to do more than replicate a figure on screen who looks and talks like him - that it'd be impossible for anyone other than the author himself to convey the indescribable complexity of a person as indescribably complex as himself - that it'd be impossible for mimesis and facsimile of a person to become a viable way to encounter the author, in a way that feels alive and genuine and authentic.
I think David Foster Wallace was worried about appearing in the public eye because everything produced and disseminated by the mass media up to that point had been immensely pleasurable but also cheap and hollow and superficial - and therefore to be disseminated in that way he would have to become something similar. I think he might have subconsciously assumed there could be no translation of the self into the world of TV and commercial entertainment without selling out or seriously mutilating your identity in the process. But as it turns out, not all broadcasting has to be hollow and gratuitous. Courting fame is dangerous, no doubt - it can be toxic and corrosive to the soul, but attaining it is a powerful platform. Wanting to have your voice heard doesn't have to be selfish if what you're really aiming to do is to reach out and connect with another human being. It's always a risk - to disclose yourself fully, to tell someone what you believe, to be seen as you are - but I think the tacit agreement that all writers share by laying themselves bare on the page and writing fan letters back and forth to each other and agreeing to interviews and book readings is that it's a risk worth taking a hundred times over.
1. An airline host / flight steward(?) on a flight from KL to Birmingham noticed me clutching a copy of The Catcher in the Rye as I was boarding a plane once. He said, 'that's a great book'. I was taken aback by the unsolicited assertion, but I instantly felt a bond, an instant deep connection with this person I knew nothing about. You know that feeling when someone else loves something that you love, that not many other people really get? That feeling of finally finding someone on the same wavelength as you, that feeling of: surely nobody who likes this book can be a truly bad person. There's a powerful sense of connection when two people discover a mutual fondness for a book or an author - a connection supposedly more profound and intimate than if it turned out that you two liked the same TV show or middle eastern restaurant. It's kind of like finding out your best friend in college was really close friends with this person at university - or that you both went to the same high school or share a parent in common or something. Really good literature has the power to bring people together. When two people connect over a book you both love, you get that sense of genuine community and instant camaraderie. This manifested in me as an irrational and ardent desire to strike up a conversation about the book and perhaps become best buddies for life, but instead all I did was look up with an expression that I'm pretty sure conveyed none of the excitement and affinity I felt toward this flight steward guy and say 'oh... yeah' ↩
2. I think it was David Lipsky who wrote, 'writers have crushes on other writers' - intellectual crushes. It's just part of the territory. It's a strange and fascinating thing, the whole dynamics of infatuation - how it works, how the distance, the inaccessibility is an integral / essential part of the equation. It all hinges on the object of longing being out of reach.↩
3. The suffering channel, the last short story in DFW's last published collection of short fiction Oblivion, the artist's suffering is being seen producing his art. His greatest fear is appearing on TV. Exposing his guts, childhood traumas, foibles and insecurity and flaws and shortcomings. To cut his brain open and spill blood on the page. To disclose himself immediately and intimately to an audience he does not know in a way he has no control over.↩
4. David Foster Wallace states in the book and the film that he doesn't mind being featured in Rolling Stone, but he'd hate to be seen as the guy who wants to appear in Rolling Stone. What this film manages to pull off is that it manages to put David Foster Wallace on the big screen, while making it explicitly clear to us and everyone else involved that he most definitely does not want to be there.↩
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