Some Thoughts on DFW

Last month, Jay Wex asked whether he should re-read Infinite Jest.* After I read that post, I thought about re-reading Infinite Jest too, but then remembered that I no longer have the attention span to finish The Cat in The Hat, much less IJ. 

Instead, I decided to re-read the essay A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, about David Foster Wallace's trip aboard a luxury cruise ship. First off, its a hilarious essay. But it's impossible to read without the gloss of DFW's suicide. The essay opens recounting a suicide that had recently occurred on another ship. A young man throws himself overboard. These cruise ships are as tall as skyscrapers, and the young man is killed. DFW talks a lot about mortality and infantilization in this essay. He thinks people go on these cruises to be completely pampered - babied - because they feel "death-creep". In order to fight death, they seek retreat to an infant state. DFW is clearly freaked out by it. It's as though he understands the only way to fight this death creep is to surrender to it; throwing oneself overboard is a perfectly natural reaction in his mind to the hyper-present mortality being frantically kept at bay on the cruise.  

The story it most reminded me of is A Perfect Day for Bananafish, the Salinger story where Seymour Glass kills himself. DFW is so much like Glass. In A Supposedly Fun Thing, he describes the same sort of reverse paranoia that Glass describes: he suspects people are conspiring to make him happy.  This is exactly what the cruise personnel are charged with doing, anticipating his every need, catering to it before he knows he has it. For Wallace, as for Glass, the only way to get away from this maniacal world in which everyone conspires to make you happy is to throw yourself overboard or walk into the ocean.

Its obviously very easy to diagnose that suicide was the likely path for DFW after he's already killed himself. What is so striking about this essay is how pre-occupied he was with it, and how closely it does mirror JD Salinger's character. Maybe I will build up to reading Infinite Jest by re-reading some Salinger first.

* An aside about Jay Wexler: I am extremely jealous of his excellent blog. He write funny stuff every day and lots of very smart people read it. People who read my blog are also very smart (I can vouch for them, you, personally) but there aren't very many of them. I think he has more readers because he's "famous", and also writes every day, and he guest-blogs, whatever that is. He can do this because he's a law professor. I thought that being unemployed would be like being like a law professor, and that I would write more. But not having a job means I don't have to sit at a computer all day, so now when I have random thoughts, I just think them, and don't type them anywhere.