Plasma Pool

David Lipsky has performed an invaluable service in the latest issue of Rolling Stone by writing about the lifelong suffering and humaneness of David Foster Wallace. The Wallace that emerges from this profile is a decent man, a terrific teacher, a dog lover, someone who fought heroically against a merciless mind brutally at war against his happiness. Reading the details of Wallace’s titanic battle with depression — his reliance on antidepressants, his occasional (and quite startling) feelings of inadequacy as a writer — returned me to the dark mood that dominated the days after I first learned of his suicide, more than a month ago now. And yet, for all of his excellent reporting, I find Lipsky’s account inadequate to the darkness of my mood. Lipsky’s memorial of Wallace — a wonderful account of him as a human being — is too purely factual to do justice to what it felt like, from the perspective of a reader, a fan, to lose the writer of Infinite Jest; the weaver of long, brain-breaking, informal-but-grammatically-immaculate sentences; the inventor of a bizarrely familiar American landscape (whose only equal in his generation is perhaps George Saunders, a wholly different sort of literary beast).

My feelings point quite directly, I think, to the strangeness of mourning for someone you have never met. To do so, as I did and do, presents the mind with problems of what one might call a fundamentally Wallacian nature. I mourn for Wallace as you must mourn someone whom you know only through his writing, through the rhythmical patter of sentences, through unusual turns of phrase or surprising insights — little explosions of thought, crystallized intelligence, right there on the page — that are at first a sort of cold shock to the uninitiated and then the familiar delight one feels when encountering a luminous mind. One way of interpreting my sense of loss would be as a kind of sad narcissism on my part, I, the child-consumer, whining about the fact that one of my favorite writer won’t be producing anther big juicy novel, except of course that at the core of everything Wallace wrote is a concern with the problem of communication. Communication is deadly and serious and impossible and necessary for Wallace. When you learn that someone has experienced such intense psychic pain that he chose to take his life, you realize, at one level, how understanding others is indeed impossible. To say the word suffering is not the same as to oneself suffer. I am fortunate to lead a relatively relaxed and happy life.

And yet but that communication is possible is also confirmed by the fact that those who never met a man can feel his loss so keenly, and that one might miss the maker of distinctive word-patterns is also a sort of proof that your mourning is not merely about you but about your recognition that you were unexpectedly also all-along always receiving signals — messages from a remote location — at the moment you were consuming those sentences that you love. No more five-page-long sentences. No more footnotes or endnotes in tiny type. No more colloquial complexity. I mean, someone can do these things, can take apart Wallace’s style and reproduce it, imitate it as well as one can imitate Faulkner’s or Hemingway’s distinctive style, but to do so would betray the personal (and perhaps world-historical) necessity of Wallace’s style. To do so would be a sideshow, not art.

Wallace had an original style in an age, according to people like Fredric Jameson, that was supposed to have foreclosed the possibility of originality by its very nature. And yet, though the man is gone, his original thought-pattern remains, embedded deep in his words. The imprint of his mind — what we used to like to call a soul — is there for us to encounter, though its maker has ended his individual journey. The meaning of his sentences will always now be tempered by the knowledge of how seriously he suffered, how much of himself he was really revealing when he wrote about junkies and alcoholics and television addicts and lonely Americans trying desperately to reach out, mind to mind, and implant some idea of what it is like to be yourself, hideously yourself, into someone wrapped up in his own head zone of private sufferings and shallow amusements. There are people not yet alive who will get to know Wallace. They will discover a person, not a set of biographical facts, behind his words. He will inspire them, challenge them, anger them, make them laugh, make them for a moment understand — in a wholly inadequate manner — what unbearable suffering might feel like. He may even help others to name their suffering and to therefore, because they will recognize that they are not alone, survive a little longer.

His place among us is permanent.