Is It Too Soon to Be Callously Objective about David Foster Wallace?

Since his death in September, David Foster Wallace has become a topic of popular conversation for his novels, story collections, and non-fiction. But the greatest surge in attention has focused on the commencement address he gave to the graduating class at Kenyon College in 2005. Before his death it was a scrap of marginalia; now it’s where people turn for a glimpse of who DFW really was. The Kenyon address has probably been linked, forwarded, and blogged about more than DFW’s actual life’s work. Last month it was even published in a slim hardcover edition, titled This is Water. It’s a curious turn of events—but then again, we live in a culture that values brief motivational speeches more than full-length works of nuanced prose.

We should probably be reading one of DFW’s books right now, instead of talking about the Kenyon address. But we believe an important aspect of the speech is being overlooked.

DFW’s theme is that “a liberal arts education is not so much about filling you up with knowledge as it is about ‘teaching you how to think.’” He begins with an anecdote about a fish, to show that “the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about.” (The fish is unaware that the substance it’s swimming in is water; hence the title, This is Water.)

We like the Kenyon address mostly because it demonstrates DFW’s love of academic philosophy (“There is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute center of.”) and his belief in fiction as a survival mechanism (“Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think.”).

People who see the Kenyon address as a summary of DFW’s life and beliefs, like Tom Bissell in The New York Times, say things like,“Truthful, funny and unflaggingly warm, the address was obviously the work of a wise and very kind man.” We suspect the Kenyon address has been forwarded so many times because it makes DFW sound like the kind of sage older brother that everyone wants to hear at their graduation ceremony. But of course that’s only half the appeal. The other half is the macabre knowledge that this “wise and very kind man” DFW committed suicide 3 years after giving the address. It’s an uplifting speech, and it becomes even more poignant when you realize it’s coming from beyond the grave. There’s even a paragraph in which DFW muses on why adults who commit suicide tend to shoot themselves in the head. Most discussions of the Kenyon address end mercifully soon, with a display of affection for the young, brilliant author who was taken before his time.

But here at The Fiction Advocate we like to go a step too far.

Does anyone else suspect the Kenyon address is the work of a very imbalanced, over-medicated, self-hating guy?

Further along in the speech, DFW describes his theme as “learning how to… exercise some control over how and what you think.” If you look closely at his works, you see that his thought process is laden with psychotherapy jargon and a sense of personal failure.

Probably the most dangerous thing about an academic education—at least in my own case—is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract argument inside my head, instead of simply paying attention to what is going on right in front of me, paying attention to what is going on inside me.

DFW advises that we override our “natural default setting” (a phrase that he repeats, in some form or other, twelve times in the brief address, as if he’s trying to overcome the demons of his natural inclinations) by becoming “well-adjusted.” By that he means that we should exercise more control over our own thoughts. It sounds like the advice of someone who’s been exposed to too much clinical therapy and prescription drugs—especially since it comes from David Foster Wallace, a writer whose greatest skill is an ability to let his brain wander over vast amounts of information and miraculously enfold it all in a serendipitous, ragged whole.

As D.T. Max explains in his New Yorker profile, DFW’s unfinished novel, The Pale King, is a study of the boredom of office life. In the book, DFW uses his powers of over-analysis to explore and celebrate a quirky and overlooked aspect of modern living. But in the Kenyon address he makes boredom sound like the enemy of a “well-adjusted” life.

There happen to be whole, large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves, boredom, routine, and petty frustration… It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out… This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted.

Why is the author of Infinite Jest, a swirling 1088-page tome about various forms of addiction, which is distinguished by endless footnotes and balls-to-the-wall digressions, imploring the graduating class to regulate their lives to the point of normalcy?

The Fiction Advocate urges you not to place too much stock in the Kenyon address. It’s the doctor-approved version of DFW’s outlook on life. In this speech he tries to squelch some of the very impulses that made his fiction great, and his life a psychological hell.