RIP DFW

David Foster Wallace committed suicide last week. I read about his death in the NY Times, minutes after the story broke and shortly after posting to this blog. His wife apparently came home and found him strung up in a closet, blue and google-eyed. Later, my brother sent me a one line email, containing only the cryptic acronym that is the title of this post.

I have read only a few bit and pieces of Wallace's obra, and hated everything I read. (My review of Wallace's short story collection Oblivion can still be found on Cocodrilo's Review of Books, and is excoriating.) Still, the news hit me hard. As Benjamin's self-appointed moral touch stone and eventually worldly guide (ambitious, aren't we?), I have an obligation to confront the world in all its grisle and horror. How else can I hope to answer the hard questions when the boy is three, questions like what is death, who is god, and what's a sin? And here we have a genuine horror! True, it ranks rather low on the Novelty scale: the death of a young and prominent writer in full grip of his powers is hardly a new story. But this particular incident struck nerves on several accounts. In the first place, Wallace was the guy I thought about when I thought about the latest generation of great fiction writers. He was the iconic post-modern literary soul, erudite, reclusive, shabby, brilliant, and his demise leaves me feeling vaguely unmoored, as if suddenly my tenuous links to the world of letters had broken and I was drifting free, buffeted by an acute ignorance of both who is writing and what is being written. For the fact is I don't know who occupies the second or third ranks these days, and can make no surmises as to Wallace's successor. Who now is worrying about the great Problems of our Time? Not only do I not know the answer to this question, I suddenly realize that I wouldn't know the answer even if Wallace were alive, for I had never entered into his work with that exultant complicity on which dreams are sustained and lives are changed. Wallace's death exposes the shallowness of my reading, the spiritually eroding effects of placing a matter of supreme importance in the margins of one's life.

More than just marking the end of an era, however, Wallace's death jars because it comes so quickly on the heels of my Benjamin's birth. It wafts the odor of personal death through thoughts that were otherwise fully consumed with the scent of vibrant life, stewing in its rank and glorious peak in that stainless steel diaper pail tucked in the darkest corner of the bedroom. For hearing about Wallace's death is quite different from reading about Ten Killed in a Bomb Attack, or Thousands Missing After Tropical Storm: Wallace was a name, a face. Like all great writers, he was great because he made himself known, because he put on paper recesses of the psyche most of us have neither time nor courage nor talent to access. To see ourselves truly, we need tools, a whole host of tools, books, art, music, friends, conversation. When a great writer dies, we lose a trusted source for those tools, and we wince as much for our potentially stunted narcissism as for the face in the casket. And when it happens that the death was a suicide, we wince triply, once for the writer, once for ourselves, and once for the whole blasted affair that is mortal existence.

When I hold Benjamin, I see a shimmering surface under which I can just make out all the great Identities of the world. Soft under the skin of his pellucid brow, I see a faint but vast school of Professions, all nibbling at the surface, all hoping to be snatched up and made his own. I see the great poet, the incorruptible judge, the independent scientist, I see the austere painter, the committed environmentalist, the wild droop-eyed sax player. And when I glimpse these future rolls, I assume that when one or the other finally comes to the surface, when it impregnates itself unmistakeably on the life of the Man, that it will be as I know it to be, as it has been in the past, perhaps only as I have thought it to be in the past. I recognize the fallacy, of course, for when Benjamin the Boy becomes Benjamin the Man, the world will have shifted, and the real or imagined problems of today may have no relation to the real or imagined problems of tomorrow. But as imagination feeds on experience, so I can only project the present, even as these professional pockets of the world evolve. Wallace's death marks a sudden leap in this evolution. It rankles because it threatens to impede on that favored paternal pastime, the investiture of dreams.

I have long felt the suicide of a spouse to be one of the worst experiences possible within the purview of human relations. I think of Henry Adams, that obscure American statesmen whose one great contribution to American letters, his autobiography, somehow gets included in the literary canon in spite of the fact that neither he nor his story have anything to do with literary narrative. His book covers his youth and his old age, but abruptly skips, with only skeletal explanation, twenty years in between, during which he is reported (by extra-textual sources) to have married a beautiful woman, and then lost her to suicide. The Autobiography of Henry Adams is a brilliant book, full of fascinating historical tidbits, technical asides, and literary panache, but I can't read it without obsessing about that huge hole in its center, the specter of the Self-Annihilating Spouse. In Adam's case, I ask how did that Act shape the man at the center of text? Or, conversely, how did the man at the center of the text produce the Act? In Wallace case, I assume the Act is implicit somewhere in the work, as is his marriage, his sense of moral obligation, his weakness, his minor cruelties. News of his suicide made me want to go scour Wallace's work for clues, to find those telltale bits of Prologue in the fictionalized Past, to stretch the idealized relation between Art and Life in all its morbid finality. How perfectly sordid.

Writing about David Foster Wallace, dead or alive, in a forum dedicated to Benjamin Cosme Toews may seem odd, perhaps even perverse. But it should be remembered that BCT is the trigger, not the target of this forum. The boy has blazed Apollo-style into my life, and like the wiseman I am not, I have packed my bags and followed. I have watched him all the way down, growing in my imagination from a stationary speck on the horizon to a low, crawling glow that picked up pace and size and sense, and gradually become this shrieking body, this spark-vomiting presence, that cut through the air of my old life and landed smack dead in the center of the new. So there it is, a direct hit from the divine: a new life. But while BCT may change my life, he neither eliminates nor reduces the problems that define it, and in no way absolves me from the basic human task of creating meaning. The death of David Foster Wallace was a significant event for me. It interferes with that gleeful, highway robber nihilism that sustains me in the works of Pynchon and DeLillo, that has so consistently and powerfully opened the world for me in their great, rollicking tales of modern doom, clever, desperate tellings of nothings. Wallace belonged to that crowd. And while his death might never be important for Benjamin Cosme, who, well adjusted, will probably go into finance and never read a book, I suspect he will feel it some day, perhaps not as I felt it, but bit by bit, swept up in occassional, rambling conversations that integrate to something solid over the course of a lifetime.