David Foster Wallace and His Reluctant Pursuit of Truth

by Bobby Maddex

David Foster Wallace is one of my favorite writers, so I was saddened to hear that he had committed suicide on September 12. I was perhaps more saddened, however, once I had read the 2005 commencement speech that Wallace delivered at Kenyon College, an excerpt of which was published a week or so ago in The Wall Street Journal.

I never deluded myself into thinking that Wallace was any sort of friend to religion or traditional morality; his days were in large part devoted to indoctrinating undergrads into the funhouse-mirror world of structural and poststructural literary theory, and the fiction he wrote often embodied such absurd theoretical work in much the same way as the novels of A. S. Byatt and Umberto Eco continue to do. In short, he denied the existence of "capital-T" Truth, and said as much in his commencement address.

No, what I liked about Wallace was his humor, the clarity with which he communicated complex ideas, and his near constant search for meaning (despite believing, of course, that he would never find it), and these are all very much present in this posthumous Wall Street Journal "essay." But there's also something else here that I never saw in Wallace before, and it's what makes his suicide all the more tragic to me. It would appear that he was on the verge of recognizing a Truth of the most profound sort:

In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship---be it J. C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical prinicples---is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things---if they are where you tap meaning in life---then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already---it's been codified as myths, proverbs, cliches, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness. Worship power---you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart---you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on.

But then, Wallace backed away from this line of thinking---perhaps afraid of the demands it might make on his own life, of what it could mean for his own worship of literary theory, and of postmodernism, in particular. "None of this is about morality, or religion, or dogma, or big fancy questions of life after death," he told the students. "The capital-T Truth is about life before death. It is about making it to 30, or maybe 50, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head."

Was it this inability to pursue to its conclusion an intuitive discovery of ultimate transcendence that resulted in the despair that would end Wallace's life? I now believe that this is a distinct possibility, and it's why I ask God to have mercy on his soul.

Comments

[Truth Unites... and Divides]

David Foster Wallace and His Reluctant Pursuit of Truth

Jesus answered, "I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me." (John 14:6)

"Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with him, and he with me." (Revelations 3:20)

[ben mann]

i was deeply saddened but not really shocked by david foster wallace's decision to rebel against "the terrible master", his brilliant but dangerously insatiable mind, by suicide. i was moved to pray the Chaplet of Divine Mercy for his soul during the following week, and continue to remember him in the daily Office. all of us who appreciated his work should pray for his soul.

without the Faith of Christ, i can imagine that the likes of blaise pascal, soren kierkegaard, t.s. eliot, cardinal newman, and many others of dfw's caliber could have done the same thing or similar. these are bad times for "men with chests".

i'm particularly disturbed at how the secular media, in another sign of the times, has appeared to treat this sort of death as not markedly different from one brought by a car crash or cancer: suicide, to them, is just a slightly more confounding version of such exits. our public discourse can no longer bear questions relevant to a man's soul, not even from an atheistic perspective (like, say, that of camus).

it's just "misfortune". awful "misfortune." you hung yourself: bad luck. so sorry.

this man, with such a restless mind and heart, could have been the augustine of our day. but slavery to one's own reasonings is always a form of spiritual death: as wallace said himself, a person who rebels against such slavery by suicide is in some sense already dead. this is why we ourselves must pray to the All-Holy Theotokos to be free from slavery to our own thoughts and reasonings.

all of us ought to pray that dfw was yet able, somehow, to meet the true Master --Christ, the Eternal Word and Divine Logos-- as a penitent and not a rebel, and so find rest.

may the prayers of His All-Holy Mother bring all of us humility in our thoughts and a release from the slavery of our own reasonings, so that we may find the meaning of our lives in the Cross of Christ, and eternal life in His Resurrection.

[Kevin J Jones]

"I never deluded myself into thinking that Wallace was any sort of friend to religion or traditional morality"

While I'm generally derisive of searches for prominent crypto-Christians, Wallace referred to visiting his church in his 9/11 essay and according to his own report he attended Mass and received the Host on his cruise ship voyage, albeit in his characteristic hyper-self-conscious manner.

I was also quite touched by his depiction in Oblivion of a character yearning for the ideal of Christian marriage and yet perceiving it to be beyond all human capacity.

Myself, I always suspected Wallace treated religion as his own personal opiate to claw his way out of some addiction or psychological illness.

He was haunted, perhaps by an idea of Christ, perhaps by Christ Himself.

Wallace's own apparently flip references to Christ, "J.C." in the commencement address, are simply part of U.S. elite culture in which authentic un-self-consciously traditional religious references are unacceptable and even unspeakable.

Thus religious themes can only be addressed with humor or indirection, as when Wallace writes in his fiction 'The truth will set you free, but not until it is done with you.'

This same tendency is obvious even in the Evangelical ghetto, a manifestation of which I once observed at a "Christian coffee shop" called "J.C.'s Ground."

"In short, he denied the existence of "capital-T" Truth, and said as much in his commencement address."

Such claims are particularly slippery because his commencement address, like his novels, comes loaded with thought experiments, rhetorical tricks, role-playing, and even possibly reverse-psychology.

"This is not about truth, this is not about virtue," he says.

We must consider whether these statements are like the painting of a pipe, ironically labeled "This is not a pipe."

One response to that painting is "Of course it's a pipe! What's wrong with being a pipe?"

It's obvious if a speaker were to stand up and give a Solzhenitsyn-style address on VERITAS he would be subject to the same indifference and hostility that greeted the Russian great. Part of Wallace's shtick was to use irony and bafflegab to expose and transcend their limits.

It's clear that his commencement remarks were part of a performance. It's questionable how strictly we are to regard them as a personal statement.

And, yes, it's truly sad he died a contemptible death. RIP.

[Gerold]

Is this some sort of new trend? To make pseudo intellectual comments about a person AFTER they're dead?

To make your pitiful souls feel a little better by pretending that you know why Wallace killed himself?

That commencement speech was no performance, and you people are the farthest thing from saints.