Wallace may be dead but he is not finished, or rather the Wallace industry is not finished with him. His 2005 commencement address at Kenyon College has appeared posthumously in a book of postcard dimensions, with one sentence per page, a format more suited to the lucubrations of Khalil Gibran or Rod McKuen. Columbia University Press has issued Wallace's undergraduate philosophy thesis in a volume with his name above the title and his photograph on the cover, although his essay actually occupies 75 pages of a 262-page book, the rest filled with pieces by assorted other hands on similar topics. The torso of an unfinished novel, The Pale King, appeared last year. A volume of unpublished stories and another of uncollected journalism look to be on the horizon; two volumes of letters are in prospect as well.
Encomia soar ever higher with the passing of time; every admirer feels obliged to surpass every other admirer in the length, breadth, and depth of his admiration. James Ryerson, an elegant and judicious journalist, mourns the loss of contemporary American fiction's "most intellectually ambitious writer." Greg Carlisle, an actor and drama professor from Kentucky who spent five years producing a 500-page commentary on Infinite Jest, calls Wallace "the best and most important author of the late 20th and early 21st centuries"; one supposes Wallace had better be at least that important, if the professor is to justify devoting five years of work to criticism of a single novel. An even headier enthusiast, Jon Baskin, claims nothing less than world-historical significance for his hero:
It became a commonplace and then a cliché and then almost a taunt to call him the greatest writer of his generation, yet his project remained only vaguely understood when it was understood at all. With the benefit of time, it will be recognized that Wallace had less in common with Eggers and Franzen than he did with Dostoevsky and Joyce. (...)
Pain
He had lived for recognition and sensual pleasure; he had figured in the American entertainment culture as both producer and consumer; and he had scraped bottom. Seriousness, indeed salvation, lay along another road. In 1991 he began writing Infinite Jest, his intended summa on the national compulsion for diversion unto death. The book would engage all his powers as no previous work of his had done. Wallace was writing for his life, and for the lives of his countrymen. The matter was as grave as that.
The fundamental human experience in this novel is pain-physical, mental, emotional, contrived by the powers so that it is never quite the same for any two persons but also so that most everyone (there is one possible exception) gets rather more than he could ever want. The very word pain rings throughout the novel the way virtue does in Machiavelli or real in Proust or good in Hemingway. Seeking pain, killing pain, using pain, surviving pain are some of the variations on the theme. There are certain peculiarly American aspects to this general torment: modern democratic life features tortures less spectacular but no less intense than the sufferings of Job or the fires of the autos-da-fé. (Wallace was writing during an interlude of peace.) Of course we have analgesics and anesthetics and we don't burn heretics. Compassion is the pre-eminent democratic virtue, and many of us feel the suffering not only of our fellow human beings but of animals that we hesitate to dismiss as dumb beasts. Enormities have not vanished from our tender-hearted republic, however; quite the contrary. Psychic distress abounds. People want the wrong things, or want good things in the wrong way. Desires all too readily become addictions. Antidepressants are the most commonly prescribed medications in America. Our sensitivity to pain has prompted us to do all we can to eliminate it, but we are ever more vulnerable to the pain we cannot root out. And there will always be human monsters, who take pleasure in the pain of others, who transmit misery from generation to generation, who infect whatever they touch.
by Algis Valiunas, The Claremont Institute | Read more:
Photo: Wikipedia
