Matt Huss UNM 3-1-2013

All That Glitters:

Rescuing David Foster Wallace from Sean Kellys Nietzschean Fangs

All Things Shining introduces David Foster Wallace as the greatest writer of his generation; perhaps the greatest mind altogether.1 By the second chapter, however, Wallace has become a caricature of voluntarism, the idea that you merely need to choose what meaning you want, changing your mind anytime it is advantageous for you to do so. Sean Kelly writes,* In Wallaces Nietzschean view, we are the sole active agents in the universe, responsible for generating out of nothing whatever notion of the sacred and divine there can ever be.2 I argue that Kelly squanders an opportunity to have the greatest mind of his generation as an advocate and instead obfuscates Wallace with a preposterous prosopopeia of an easily refutable worldview. Explaining how Kelly misrepresents Wallaces project by proof verseing his Kenyon address and misinterpreting the character of Shane, nee Mitchell, Drinion, I present a more comprehensive exegesis of Drinion to demonstrate that he is actually a foil for Wallaces vision of how to find meaning in a secular age. Kelly claims that Wallace is one of his favorite writers in a blog that he created after the publication of Shining so that readers could share their own views. He writes:

Yes, the comment about what it means to be a fucking human being is one of the indications to me that hes asking interesting questions. These kinds of questions do put him more in the cultural
*

Hubert Dreyfuss gives Kelly all the credit for writing the sections on Wallace.

physician role that someone like Nietzsche occupies That seems to me where his real contributions lie.

Deciphering what it means to be a fucking human being, is Wallaces own definition of what he was trying to accomplish in his fiction. One of the primary reasons Kelly misinterprets Wallace is that he makes the seductive mistake of conflating Wallace with his characters. A novelist is all and none of his characters. He must imagine the characters personalities deeply and the novelists own personality inevitably informs his characters personalities. It is, however, a problematic hermeneutical apparatus to infer a novelists beliefs from a fictional character. Milan Kundera, the writer whom I believe has most clearly articulated the role of the novelist says:
The status of great man, is not what a novelist aims for; by the nature of his art, he is secretive, ambiguous, ironical and above all: concealed as he is behind his characters, it is difficult to reduce him to some particular conviction or attitude. 3

It is exactly for this reason that we must start with what a writer states unequivocally and then glean whether his fictional characters represent those beliefs. Kundera is in the line of philosophical novelists such as Thomas Mann, Herman Broch, Robert Musil and others who take the license of interrupting their narrative in order to present a philosophical aside. Others such as Samuel Beckett, David Markson and the omnipresent poets of modern philosophy present philosophical ideas implicitly without ever writing didactically. Either way, we must not assume it is the authors personal philosophy that is being presented unless it is unambiguously presented as such. Special care must be taken with Wallace in this regard since he frequently uses hyperbole in his fiction and essays. Witold Gombrowicz, another philosophical author, wrote, Never write about the author or the work, only about yourself in 2

confrontation with the work or the author. You are allowed to write about yourself." Perhaps Shinings exposition of Wallace tells us more about Kelly than about Wallace. Wallace also commented on interpreting philosophical fiction:
Certain novels not only cry out for what we call critical interpretations but actually try to help direct them. . Frequently, too, the novels that direct their own critical reading concern themselves thematically with what we might consider highbrow or intellectual issues stuff proper to art philosophy, etc. These novels carve out for themselves an interstice between flatout fiction and a sort of weird cerebral roman clef. When t hey fail theyre pretty dreadful. But when they succeed, as I claim David Marksons Wittgensteins Mistress does, they serve the vital and vanishing function of reminding us of fictions limitless possibilities for reach and grasp, for making heads throb heartlike, and for sanctifying the marriages of cerebration & emotion, abstraction & lived life, transcendent truth-seeking & daily schlepping, marriages that in our happy epoch of technical occlusion and entertainment-marketing seem increasingly consummatable only in the imagination. 4

Slavoj iek offers a similar thought in Less Than Nothing concerning the incommunicability of the holocaust: What cannot be described should be inscribed into the artistic form as its uncanny distortion.5 Relating Primo Levis nightmare of his family getting bored with remembrances of Auschwitz and also the story of the Bosnian girls who killed themselves when no one could grasp their horrific rapes, iek writes, In Lacans terms, what is missing here is not only another human being, the attentive listener, but the big Other itself, the space of the symbolic inscription or registration of my words.6 A restructuring or expansion of the listeners palette of perception must first be accomplished and only then can the truth be communicated with empathy. Jonathan Franzen writes:
Dave loved details for their own sake, but details were also an outlet for the love bottled up in his heart: a way of connecting, on relatively safe middle ground, with another human being.

But that neutral middle ground on which to make a deep connection with another human being : this, we decided, was what fiction was for. A way out of loneliness was the formulation we agreed to agree on.7

With this in mind, consider Shane Drinion. Drinion is happy, Wallace writes, because he can give perfect attention to whatever he has in front of him. Kelly makes much of this idea of happiness as being able to pay complete attention once you have passed through crushing boredom. Wallace writes in The Pale King:
Drinion is happy. Ability to pay attention. It turns out that bliss a second-by-second joy + gratitude at the gift of being alive, conscious lies on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom. Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you can find (tax returns, televised golf), and, in waves, a boredom like youve never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and its like stepping from black and white into color. Like wat er after days in the desert. Constant bliss in every atom. 8

A superficial reading seems to corroborate Kelly. Another scene referenced by Kelly near the end of Pale King has Drinion blissfully floating, but the context is that of the IRS looking for people who are robotic and able to do audits quickly and accurately. Following Wallaces own hermeneutic guidelines we must consider the novels omnipresent hyperbole as well as the full context when exegeting it. I do not dismiss the possibility of a purposeful antinomy, however, since the best literature raises questions without didactically answering them as Kelly inveigles Wallaces words to do. We find Drinion, again, in a bar talking to a preternaturally beautiful woman:
Suffice it that Meredith Rand makes the Pods males self-conscious. They thus tend to become either nervous and uncomfortably quiet, as though they were involved in a game whose stakes have suddenly become terribly high, or else they become more voluble and conversationally dominant and begin to tell a great many jokes, and in general appear deliberately unself-conscious,

whereas before Meredith Rand had arrived and pulled up a chair and joined the group there was no real sense of deliberateness or even self-consciousness among them.9

It is a common literary technique to exert pressure on a character and use his reactions to the pressure as a way of characterizing him. All the other characters are affected by the pressure of the appearance of the stunning Meredith Rand, but Drinion is not affected at all. He is the completely technologized person in the sense that he is not affected by anything outside of him. He is so technologized that he can pay complete attention to whatever, or whomever, is in front of him, but has lost the capacity for any true connection with another human being. Drinion is a blatantly hyperbolic instantiation of Nietzschean self-optimization, a foil to Wallaces what it means to be a fucking human being, not the Wallacian bermensch of voluntarism that Kelly portrays him as. Wallaces notes were placed after this scene in the published edition of Pale King:
Big issue is human examiners or machines. Sylvanshine is after the best human examiners he can find. Embryonic outline: 2 Broad arcs: 1. Paying attention, boredom, ADD, Machines vs. people at performing mindless jobs. 2. Being individual vs. being part of larger thingspaying taxes, being lone gun in IRS vs. team player.

David Wallace disappears 100 pp in. Central Deal: Realism, monotony. Plot a series of set-ups for stuff happening, but nothing actually happens. David Wallace disappearsbecomes creature of the system. 10

The character David Wallace disappears into the system. Once again we must consider Wallaces hyperbole and context to see that what he means by happy or blissful is not pleasure but 5

unfeeling technologization. Drinion is the archetype of our happy epoch of technical occlusion and entertainment-marketing. He is a bliss machine. Kelly claims this section, where Wallace speaks of turning boredom into bliss, is the premise of Pale King. I would look to the epigraph for a less hyperbolic theme: We fill preexisting forms and when we fill them we change them and are changed.11 There is the obvious pun on the IRS examiners who deal with paper forms all day long but, more importantly, there is the discovery of personal identity via extant forms, that is, self-understanding and ways of seeing and being in the world. In a iekian gesture of inscribing a distortion into the big Other, we step into and expand the forms that others will subsequently fill and expand further. Being aware of the ubiquitous Nietzschean forces allows us to make choices and transcend those forms in a selfperpetuating, transformative cycle of self and world. Turning now to Wallaces public statements, his 2005 Kenyon College commencement address may be the only situation where he tried to expound his overarching personal philosophy in a structured and direct manner. None of his essays attempt to address the scope of the Kenyon address. His theme on that day was very similar to the theme of Shining: recognize and overcome our cultural nihilism by finding meaning in the already meaningful things surrounding us. After highlighting our blindness to our nihilism via a joke about a young fish who doesnt know what water is, he paints a broad stroke about human nature: Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence.12 The point he wants to make is that we have a choice as to whether we want to continue in that default setting or do the hard work of discerning and transcending it. Wallace continues: 6

Look, if I choose to think this way, fine, lots of us do -- except that thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic it doesn't have to be a choice. Thinking this way is my natural defaultsetting. It's the automatic, unconscious way that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when I'm operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the center of the world and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world's priorities.

He then urges the students to consider the clichd aphorism that a liberal arts education is about learning how to think:
It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience it's a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default-setting, which is to be deeply and literally self-centered, and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self.

By first discerning what is out there, we can then decide what has meaning and hold on to that. Wallace insists that we are always worshipping something, whether we realize it or not, but we can choose at which temple to worship. Kelly sets up his forced dialectic with Wallace about halfway through Shining: the attempt to set up ones own values and assign ones own meaning to things rather than cultivate their latent meaning13 Kelly cherry picked the Kenyon address in order to set up a straw man of nihilism. Setting the two projects side by side with our now deeper understanding of Wallace produces construct meaning from experience versus cultivate latent meaning. A much more nuanced comparison than is offered in Shining is necessary to explicate the differences in the worldviews and concomitant projects. Construct and cultivate, other than Kellys carefully chosen and rather romantic reference to nature, are too similar to spend much time on. Kelly is correct that choice is important to Wallace, but choice is inherent in both projects since, in either case, you must first 7

be aware of some need and then decide how to satisfy it. In both projects the need is the perceived absence of meaning. The crux of the tension between Kelly and Wallace lays not in choice, but whether meaning is waiting to be found or needing to be built from what is found. Wallace does not give any explicit evidence that he believed in latent meaning as Kelly does. He does not give any explicit evidence that he does not believe in latent meaning either. What he says is that we must be aware of the texture of our surroundings, to consider our experiences and to build meaning from what is at hand. What he definitely does not say is to pragmatically choose meaning out of thin air, as Kelly claims he does. Shining asserts, The project, then, is not to decide what to care about, but to discover what it is about which one already cares.14 This sounds very similar to what has already been said about Wallaces project. The difference is that Kelly believes that the things we innately care about are the shining things, the important things. Wallace believes we would choose self-serving things if we do not first get outside ourselves and discover what is important from this more objective view. Live sports events are one way Shining proposes we can experience this latent meaning in things we already care about. The communal experience of seeing an athletic play that seems to surpass human capabilities creates a whoosh whereby all the walls and defenses we have built fall simultaneously and we feel a sense of oneness with each other and the world. The subsurface unity of all things, as Wallace puts it. Undoubtedly it is a thrill to witness some otherworldly display of athleticism, but it is exactly the mandate of self-optimization that has created the environment for that display to occur. Professional athletes pursue money and winning, the overcoming of other self-optimizing athletes. They spend a high percentage of their lives working toward both points and dollars. These simple metrics, points and dollars, make it possible to determine the Nietzschean winner. 8

Conversely, discovering something resonant in a work of art, including literature like Wallaces, does not make me jump up and scream, but it does make me want to share it and the sharing brings me deeper into the experience. It stays with me, changes me, and inscribes me, making me see and desire more moments of sharing and growth. The loud whoosh of sports is easy, fleeting and fun. The quiet whoosh of art generally requires disciplined preparation, is permanently transformative, but is still fun and exhilarating. If we are to reach for lasting meaning it must be where everyone wins, so to speak. As Dave Hickey has quipped, Do we practice to play or do we play to practice? A sport, by definition, creates a small other: someone who must lose. This is much more Nietzschean than anything Wallace proposes. Ironically, the idea that meaning is latent in live sports events is much more compellingly argued by Wallace. Shining references an essay on Roger Federer, erroneously claiming that Wallace misses the importance of the live event because he describes a moving experience created by watching Federer on TV. In fact, Wallace explicitly states the necessity of being there live to get the true experience. Recently republished as Federer Both Flesh and Not, Wallace writes:
Beauty is not the goal of competitive sports, but high-level sports are a prime venue for the expression of human beauty. The relation is roughly that of courage to war. The human beauty were talking about here is beauty of a particular type; it might be called kinetic beauty. Its power and appeal are universal. It has nothing to do with sex or cultural norms. What it seems to have to do with, really, is human beings reconciliation with the fact of having a body.

Genius is not replicable. Inspiration, though, is contagious, and multiform and even just to see, close up, power and aggression made vulnerable to beauty is to feel inspired and (in a fleeting, mortal way) reconciled.15

The whoosh of inspiration and reconciliation described by Wallace almost makes me believe that sports can be more than a temporary distraction or entertainment. Perhaps Kelly will one day reconsider Wallace the way that Alain Badiou did with Samuel Beckett. Calling himself a cretin for reading Beckett so superficially in his youth, Badiou wrote:
It took me many years to rid myself of this stereotype and at last to take Beckett at his word. No, what Beckett offers to thought through his art is not this gloomy corporeal immersion into an abandoned existence, into hopeless relinquishment. The lesson of Beckett is a lesson in measure, exactitude and courage.16

I would add compassion to measure, exactitude and courage when describing Wallace. Part of his project was to reveal the many options there are for interpreting our world. The only thing Wallace insisted on was kindness. That old-fashioned word as clichd as the liberal arts mission of learning how to think that Wallace breathed life back into. It is clear that both Kelly and Wallace desire a better world where meaning can be found in the things that shine. Kelly believes meaning can be found in community. So does Wallace. Kelly believes that meaning can be found in great literature. So does Wallace. Kelly believes we must cultivate meaning from extant culture. So does Wallace. Whether meaning is found in literature, art, a new polytheism as Shining also suggests, or even sports, these projects should be aware of each other and work in concert, learning from each other and leading humanity toward a new epoch of making heads throb heartlike [by] sanctifying the marriage [of] transcendent truth-seeking [and] daily schlepping.

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Works Cited
1

Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly, All Things Shining, (New York: Free Press, 2011), p. 57 Dreyfus, p. 57 Milan Kundera, Encounter, Trans. Linda Asher, (New York: Harper Collins, 2010), p. 45

David Foster Wallace, Both Flesh and Not: Essays (2012-11-06). Little, Brown and Company. Kindle Edition. pgs. 74-76. Slavoj iek, Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (New York: Norton, 2012), p. 25. Kindle Edition.
6 5

Ibid, p.29

Jonathan Franzen, Five Dials, Celebrating the Life and Work of David Foster Wallace 19622008, A Five Dials Special, (New York: Hamish Hamilton, 2008).
8

David Foster Wallace, The Pale King. Hachette Book Group. Kindle Edition. (Location 8612) Ibid, (Location 6806) Ibid, (Location 8596) Ibid, (Location 92)

10

11

David Foster Wallace, David Foster Wallace on Life and Work: Adapted from a commencement speech given by David Foster Wallace to the 2005 graduating class at Kenyon College . Wall Street Journal, (September 19, 2008), http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122178211966454607.html (accessed December 2, 2011).
13

12

Dreyfus, p. 126 Dreyfus, pgs. 215-6 Wallace, Flesh. (Kindle Locations 82-85).

14

15

Alain Badiou, On Beckett. Trans. by Nina Powers and Alberto Toscano, (Manchester: Clinamen Press, 2003), p. 40

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