On the occasion of the new David Foster Wallace biopic, The End of the Tour, New York Magazine’s culture blog, Vulture, posted a piece called “The Rewriting of David Foster Wallace.” Wallace’s posthumous persona, says the critic, Christian Lorenzen, has been reformed around the moral image presented in his 2005 Kenyon College commencement speech, which has since been published in book form as “This is Water.” The speech (the “least interesting version of himself [Wallace] ever put to the page”) talks about the need for empathy. It’s a cry against solipsism and self-centeredness whose main narrative follows a very middleclass and mundane trip to the grocery store during which, Wallace says, the protagonist should really be kind and courteous even though he’s in a hurry and feels overwhelming contempt for those around him.
David Foster Wallace reading at Pomona College, 2008.
The moral of the story, in Lorenzen’s words, is “breathtakingly obvious.” He’s right. It is obvious, but not unimportant, and perhaps appropriate for the occasion. More to the point, it’s earned—at least, if the speech “works” for its audience. Wallace gets to his message by endlessly acknowledging the banality of the ultimate conclusion, and by following a tortured path of self-doubt and skepticism. By the time he circles back to his moral, he’s made you inhabit his depressive view of the world, and (again, if it works) made you accept what both you and he acknowledged at the beginning was a predictable and banal conclusion.
In my first year in graduate school I went to a workshop that made a similar point about Nabokov’s moral universe. Though it was called “Nabokov and the High Stakes of Art,” it ended up proving the opposite. One of the presenters, Dana Dragonoiu gave a paper called “Nabokov and the Anatomy of Courtesy,” in which she argued that the central value at the core of Nabokov’s (at the very least, late) works was courtesy. Specifically, she pointed to one scene near the end of Ada in which a despairing Lucette, on the deck of the ship from which she will leap to her own death, meets a couple she has known in the past. She treats them with the politeness and courtesy befitting a woman of her status (and one who is not on the brink of suicide). Her behavior in this scene, according to Dragonoiu, offers a window into the positive values that Nabokov would advocate.
But this is horribly unsatisfying. If courtesy is all there is at the heart of this 600-page novel—if a novel so beautifully and carefully constructed, so demanding of its reader, leads to nothing more than the politeness of the well-brought-up—then isn’t it kind of a waste of time? This was, at least, the general feeling in the room. And even though it wasn’t necessarily what Dragonoiu was there to argue, it’s an important point (and it played a role in moving me away from Nabokov studies).
It’s also a point very similar to Lorenzen’s about DFW. Like Wallace’s, Nabokov’s message is anti-solipsistic, it involves a kind of empathy, and it’s a very bourgeois, intra-class type of morality. It’s ultimately unsatisfying for some readers, and if it is at all satisfying, it’s because it’s earned in a complex and intricate way. Nabokov earns it not through tortuous logic and self-doubt, but through beauty, cruelty, and magicianship. But he gets to a similar place.
Why are these conclusions so unsatisfying for some readers? And why is that the readers most unsatisfied seem to be the attentive, sophisticated readers for whom Nabokov and Wallace seem to be writing? And what’s the alternative?
I posed this question to a friend of mine who agreed with Lorenzen’s article: What would be an ultimately satisfying conclusion? But the problem, it turns out, is in the formulation of the question. More satisfying works, said my friend, have no real ultimate conclusion (he mentioned Kafka and Faulkner). Instead, they have unknowability built into their structure.
The problem with Nabokov and Wallace, it turns out, is not necessarily their conclusions, but their shared sensibility. Their works present worlds subject to perception, investigation, and logic, where a sharp eye and skeptical mind can lead the reader to deeper truth. And indeed, both validate literary analysis. Close readings of Lolita or Infinite Jest reward obsessive hermeneutics with revelations of obscure allusions, intricate verbal play, and carefully planned structural elements. The problem is that each of these revelations feels intermediary. Each should lead to some deeper understanding of the work, some greater truth, suggesting that (1) there is an ultimate truth buried somewhere, and (2) these same hermeneutic practices that have gotten readers this far should lead them the rest of the way.
These are writers of reason. They set up ultimately reasonable worlds in which attention to detail, tenacious reading, and logic are rewarded. Nothing seems unknowable here. Everything is available to the right kind of mind. (Nabokov even says as much in his many treatises on good readers.)
In contrast, writers of wonder, like Kafka and Faulkner present a different kind of world, perhaps best (or at least most concisely) exemplified in Kafka’s short parables like “Before the Law” or “An Imperial Message.” Unlike the intricate masterpieces of Wallace and Nabokov, these short tales present a simple surface behind which seems to be an enormous truth. But the surface itself is unscratchable. Hermeneutics can’t reveal one layer after another. The stories are immediately understandable, but somehow also impenetrable, upon a first reading.
These fables used to frustrate me endlessly. I hated how dumb I felt reading “Before the Law.” Nothing seemed to make sense, and I couldn’t find a point of entry (not coincidentally similar to the character trying to gain access to the Law). Works like Nabokov’s and Wallaces were much more thrilling. The more I read, the more I knew.
And this is a normal modern reaction. We want the world to be subject to logic. We want it to reveal its secrets if we try hard enough to discover them. But maybe there is a point of maturation—in a person’s life and maybe also in the development of modernity—when we find the ultimate conclusions unsatisfying, when what we really want is a sense of mystery, of wonder, of enchantment. And maybe that’s when writers of reason (while still entertaining and at times thrilling to read) give way to writers of wonder.