Did Academia Kill David Foster Wallace?

UPDATE: While I still find this article agenda-driven and offensive, it turns out that both it and the Rolling Stone piece mentioned came out at the same time, so it does not so much willfully ignore the Rolling Stone article as it does simply make preposterous conclusions about DFW's life and work based on absolutely no evidence. Still bullshit, but not quite as intellectually dishonest as I thought.

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When an article compares a dead artist to Kurt Cobain, my horseshit detector goes way up. Probably because Kurt Cobain wasn't my Kurt Cobain, if that makes any sense.  And sure enough, there's a lot of horseshit to be found in this article about David Foster Wallace in the UK's Prospect Magazine. But nothing is so ridiculous, so preeningly shallow an example of self serving faux intellectualism as this paragraph:

He was an immensely gifted and original writer, with a brilliant, hyper-analytical mind. The two things such people should avoid are marijuana and universities. He was aware of the dangers of the former (which was not just a threat to his prose—after his first novel he checked into rehab and asked to be put on suicide watch). But he couldn't escape the warm, welcoming trap of the latter. Only universities will give a job for life and full health insurance to a novelist with heavy-metal hair and a history of depression. He was, as ever, aware of the risk to his fiction. In a brilliant, painful television interview with Charlie Rose in 1997, he said, "Oh boy, don't even get me started on teaching… The more time and energy spent on teaching, which is extraordinarily hard to do well, the less time spent on your own work… I find myself saying this year the same thing I said last year, and it's a little bit horrifying." He looked like a trapped animal. He'd been teaching for four years. Eleven years later, still teaching creative writing, never having written another novel, he killed himself.

Unmentioned in this article? That David Foster Wallace was an almost-lifelong seriously clinically depressed person and that his death was the end result of a medical process that didn't work.  Rolling Stone did a long wrap-up of DFW's history with drugs and mental illness shortly after he died based on interviews the journalist did with many of DFW's loved ones and the man himself over several years.  

The story is this: DFW spent most of his adult life on a very heavy anti-depressant called nardil after he became suicidally depressed as an adolescent (not, contra Julian Gough, after he wrote his first book and started taking drugs).  He remained on the drug until shortly before his death.  After he wrote his first novel, he entered a second major depressive tail-spin because of his use of drugs, and eventually went through rehab and stopped using them and wrote Infinite Jest.

DFW died because in consultation with his family and his doctors, he tried to switch anti-depressants. He felt the Nardil was getting in the way of his writing, contributing to his excessive weight, and that he was stable and in a happy relationship and a good job and it would be a good time to do so.  The drugs he switched to didn't work, so they tried to put him back on the Nardil.  Nardil, like some other anti-depressants, does not always work again when you try to go back on it and sure enough, it didn't work. Nothing did, and eventually he hanged himself.  

It's tragic, and while we can speculate all sorts of reasons behind his lifelong depression, or his writer's block etc. I find using someone's suicide to advance one's ongoing agenda to be totally disgusting and offensive, particularly when it involves deliberately ignoring the established facts of Wallace's life and work (including his $500,000 MacArthur "Genius" Award and that several of his books were bestsellers in the United States to make it seem like Wallace was forced into academia by financial concerns, something there's no evidence of).  This is not to say that the article doesn't make some good points about the market and experimental work, or even academia or about how beautiful a book Infinite Jest is, but Gough's use of Wallace's death is shameful.

(h/t E Spreen)

Comments

[Elizabeth]

Yeah. This article takes a lot of interpretive liberties and makes a lot of erroneous assumptions. A shower is almost a requirement after reading it. I thought the RS article was better. Better still is just reading DFW.

[steven germain]

Yes to what you say but you too drop the ball - what of DFW's criticisms of higher education (lets all stipulate - having nothing to do with his clinical diagnosis). Push the "on" button of your horseshit detector - what does it say about higher education?

[Julian Gough]

Hi Isaac,

I gather we see David Foster Wallace's life, and death, from slightly different angles. Certainly we have some differences of interpretation, but...

"preeningly shallow"

"self serving faux intellectualism"

"using someone's suicide to advance one's ongoing agenda"

"totally disgusting and offensive"

"preposterous conclusions"

and

"bullshit"

seem to indicate that you think I was writing in bad faith - that I was twisting the truth and, as you say, “deliberately ignoring the established facts of Wallace's life and work “, and "using someone's suicide to advance one's ongoing agenda".

That's not really how it feels from here, or how it felt while I was writing the piece. I was writing in the direct aftermath of David Foster Wallace’s suicide (Prospect, being a monthly magazine, needs its articles well ahead of their publication date). I was very upset by his death, and I tried to write about his life, death, and work as honestly as I could.

Your anger would be justified if the interpretation you have put on what I said, and on my motivation for saying it, were correct. But I think you’ve misunderstood (or perhaps just over-interpreted) what I was saying. Perhaps the failure is mine, I tried to compress a lot of ideas about David Foster Wallace, academia, and American prose into a very short space, and I may have failed to make my meaning clear. But, just to clarify, my intended meaning is not the one you attribute to me.

Best of luck with your blog, and with your own work.

-Julian Gough

[Todd Lord]

Julian only makes it worse defending himself here. My mother works for a small private "American" university in an art department and her professors are happy as shit. They get summers off, more money than people working their asses off over forty hours a week and pop into campus only once or twice a week. WTF? The guy had a great job and even if it sucked he only had to be there once and a while. Depression is clinical and taking medication makes it worse. Also having academic parents and following in their footsteps is also something that might make someone depressed. Nobody wants to feel like their life has been lived by default. But blame a job like that? Fuck off, dumb ass!