David Foster Wallace and Religion

Essays on Faith and Fiction

Michael McGowan, Martin Brick

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781501345296
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Nordamerikanische Literaturkritik

In the years since his suicide, scholars have explored David Foster Wallace's writing in transdisciplinary ways. This is the first book of its kind to discuss how Wallace understood and wrote about religion. At present, the scholarly community is sharply divided on how best to read Wallace on religious questions. Some interpret him to be a Nietzschean nihilist, while others see in him a profoundly spiritual, even mystical thinker. Some read Wallace as a Buddhist thinker, and others as a Christian existentialist. Involved at every level of this discussion are Wallace's experiences in Twelve Step recovery programs, according to which only a higher power can help one remove unwanted defects of character. The multifarious essays in this volume by literature, religion, and philosophy scholars in the Wallace community delve into Wallace's life and writings to advance the conversation about Wallace and religion. While they may disagree with one another in substantial ways, the contributors argue that Wallace was not only deliberate in his writings on religious themes, but also displayed an impressive level of theological nuance.

1

Came to Believe: The Religion of Alcoholics Anonymous in Infinite Jest

Rob Short

In his introduction to the twentieth-anniversary edition of Infinite Jest, Tom Bissell writes: “While I have never been able to get a handle on Wallace’s notion of spirituality, I think it is a mistake to view him as anything other than a religious writer. His religion, like many, was a religion of language.”¹ While I agree with Bissell that to understand Wallace (at least from Infinite Jest on) as anything other than a religious writer is a mistake, I am surprised by Bissell’s confession that he has difficulty understanding Wallace’s spiritual motivations, especially given the context. Wallace mentions spirituality and religion in numerous places—from interviews with Brian Garner and Larry McCaffery, to the commencement speech at Kenyon College, to nonfiction essays like “The Nature of the Fun.”² However, nowhere in Wallace’s output is spirituality discussed more frequently or at greater length than in Infinite Jest. What’s more, Wallace is reasonably consistent about what he says. This spiritual consistency, I would argue, stems from Wallace’s first serious engagement with religion: his participation in Alcoholics Anonymous (AA).

The presence of AA in Infinite Jest has not gone critically unnoticed. However, given the many long stretches of the novel that are set in Boston AA meetings, the amount of secondary literature that reads Wallace through AA is scant, especially since D.T. Max’s biography³ has made obvious the overlaps between the twelve-step programs in Wallace’s personal history and his fiction. Although a handful of critics have published shorter pieces⁴ considering addiction or recovery in Wallace’s writing, there exists no monograph-length study of the enormous importance of twelve-step recovery programs across the larger body of his work, nor any sustained study of the way that Wallace’s religious attendance of AA meetings or his rigid adherence to AA’s doctrine informs his fiction. Wallace considered himself an addict; failure to read him as one is to forego one of the most productive critical lenses at our disposal.

Among the aforementioned handful of Wallace critics, Timothy Aubry, the author of “Selfless Cravings: Addiction and Recovery in Wallace’s Infinite Jest,” comes closest to my approach. In “Selfless Cravings,” Aubry argues that AA’s function in Infinite Jest is to provide a narrative counterweight to the dispassionate aesthetic that prevailed in American literature at the time, serving as a kind of Trojan horse by which Wallace could smuggle his more sentimental tendencies into the novel. I contend rather that Wallace’s adoption and internalization of twelve-step doctrine is what made Infinite Jest possible at all.

Wallace began having bouts of anxiety and paranoia—symptoms he would later recognize as the onset of his mental illness—at the age of ten.⁵ During his freshman year of high school, he started self-medicating these symptoms with alcohol and marijuana. Over the next fifteen years, what began as coping mechanisms grew into dependency, and at twenty-eight, Wallace’s excessive substance abuse and a concomitant mental health crisis landed him in a series of hospitals, state-run mental health facilities, and halfway houses. As a recovering addict, he joined twelve-step recovery programs for both narcotics and alcohol, maintaining his sobriety with regular attendance at Narcotics Anonymous and AA meetings until his death in 2008.

Wallace’s initial participation in AA was not an entirely volitional affair; regular attendance at meetings was a requirement for all residents of the halfway houses where he lived for nearly two years. The idea that a group of addicts huddled in smoke-filled church basements sharing personal stories of addiction with one another could somehow solve his substance-abuse problem was an affront to his intelligence. Wallace found the program’s clichéd vernacular and its insistence on members’ belief in a higher power too hokey to be taken seriously, a sentiment we see portrayed frequently in Infinite Jest.

In the Big Book,⁶ the only indispensable text for all AA members and the one that officially outlines AA’s doctrine, alcoholism is presented as a self-inflicted problem, and that “self” is understood as a tripartite construction comprising the “mind,” “body,” and—crucially—the “spirit” of the alcoholic. This spiritual side of the self is basically the human capacity for numinous or religious experiences—something like the feeling of being moved emotionally by the sublime. The Big Book proposes this spiritual component of the self as an explanation for the preponderance of religion in so many disparate cultures, for the “persistence of the myth”—whether it be true or not. But most importantly, the Big Book’s authors see this innate spiritual capacity as something that is exceptionally and singularly human. In Chapter 4, “We Agnostics,” they elaborate on how this third component, the alcoholic’s spiritual or metaphysical aspect, must be reformed.

“We Agnostics” relates the difficulty some of the earliest members of AA had with following the second step. This amounts to a fairly big problem for someone in AA because the rest of the twelve steps hang on the acceptance of the first two: “1. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable” and “2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.”⁷ Writing as former agnostics who had been able to overcome their skepticism, the authors are “at pains to tell why we think our present faith is reasonable, why we think it more sane and logical to believe than not to believe, why we say our former thinking was soft and mushy when we threw up our hands in doubt and said ‘We don’t know.’”⁸ When the agnostics looked closely at what held them back from being “restored to sanity” through belief in a “Power greater than [them]selves,”⁹ they found it was another belief—a belief in their own ability to reason, or a faith in their reasonable faculties:

Let us think a little more closely. Without knowing it, had we not been brought to where we stood by a certain kind of faith? For did we not believe in our own reasoning? Did we not have confidence in our ability to think? What was that but a sort of faith? Yes, we had been faithful, abjectly faithful to the God of Reason. So, in one way or another, we discovered that faith had been involved all the time!

We found, too, that we had been worshippers.… Had we not variously worshipped people, sentiment, things, money, and ourselves? … Who of us had not loved something or somebody? How much did these feelings, these loves, these worships, have to do with pure reason? Little or nothing, we saw at last. Were not these things the tissue out of which our lives were constructed? Did not these feelings, after all, determine the course of our existence? It was impossible to say we had no capacity for faith, or love, or worship. In one form or another we had been living by faith and little else.¹⁰

The authors go on to explain that the matter of their conversion was no small thing; if they had not been primed to accept the necessity of handing over their wills to a higher power, they probably would not have been able to do it—save that they had recently experienced a particular event in the narrative common to all addicts: hitting bottom. And at the point in David Foster Wallace’s life when the Big Book crossed his path, he was already on a steep downward trajectory.¹¹

Even so, Wallace could not simply accept what AA said about spirituality on faith; he had to do his own research. At least one of the texts Wallace consulted was Huston Smith’s The World’s Religions: Our Great Wisdom Traditions.¹² I mention this here because I think it goes a long way toward helping us “get a handle on Wallace’s notion of spirituality.” In his copy of Smith’s text, Wallace annotated the following passage:

Might not becoming a part of a larger, more significant whole relieve life of its triviality? That question announces the birth of religion. For though in some watered-down sense there may be a religion of self-worship, true religion begins with the quest for meaning and value beyond self-centeredness. It renounces the ego’s claims to finality.

But what is this renunciation for? The question brings us to the two signposts on the Path of Renunciation. The first of these reads “the community,” as the obvious candidate for something greater than ourselves. In supporting at once our own life and the lives others, the community has an importance no single life can command. Let us, then, transfer our allegiance to it, giving its claims priority over our own.

This transfer marks the first great step in religion. It produces the religion of duty, after pleasure and success the third great aim of life in the Hindu outlook. Its power over the mature is tremendous. Myriads have transformed the will-to-get into the will-to-give, the will-to-win into the will-to-serve. Not to triumph but to do their best—to acquit themselves responsibly, whatever the task at hand—has become their prime objective.¹³

And in the margin next to his underlining is Wallace’s note: “AA.”

I do not mean here to equate the underscoring of a passage with its unequivocal or uncritical endorsement, but neither do I think it a stretch to say that Wallace had read the Big Book closely enough to see in this passage from Smith the core principles of “spirituality” as they are presented in AA: the relinquishment of the will to a power greater than oneself and the consequent undertaking of work in service of others. As the Big Book (cribbing the KJV) cautions: “faith without works is dead.”¹⁴

This notion of “service” and its relation to self-centeredness is one that crops up again and again in AA’s Big Book: “Never was I to pray for myself, except as my requests bore on my usefulness to others. Then only might I expect to receive…. Simple, but not easy; a price had to be paid. It meant the destruction of self-centeredness.”¹⁵ In fact, the concept of service work—“passing it on,” as it is codified in one AA maxim—is directly and repeatedly correlated with the chances of a successful recovery:

For if an alcoholic failed to perfect and enlarge his spiritual life through work and self-sacrifice for others, he could not survive the certain trials and low spots ahead. If he did not work, he would surely drink again, and if he drank he would surely die. Then faith would be dead indeed. With us it is just like that…. Faith has to work twenty-four hours a day in and through us, or we perish (14–16); Our very lives, as ex-problem drinkers, depend upon our constant thought of others and how we may help meet their needs … ; Whatever our protestations, are not most of us concerned with ourselves, our resentments, or our self-pity? Selfishness—self-centeredness! That, we think, is the door of our troubles…. So our troubles, we think, are basically of our own making. They arise out of ourselves, and the alcoholic is an extreme example of self-will run riot, though he usually doesn’t think so. Above everything, we alcoholics must be rid of this selfishness. We must, or it kills us!¹⁶

Ultimately, the mere abstention from drinking is not finally the point; it is rather a means to another rehabilitation—the restoration of the capacity for service: “At the moment we are trying to put our lives in order. But this is not an end in itself. Our real purpose is to fit ourselves to be of maximum service to God and the people about us.”¹⁷

I am inclined to read all of Wallace’s writing from Infinite Jest on as a function of “working the steps.” Because although Wallace’s status as an addict was a large part of what defined his identity, so too was his status as a writer. As an addict, Wallace knew AA had saved his life; as a writer, he saw an opportunity to be of service by passing on what he had learned through his fiction. Wallace’s sobriety enabled him to w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Understanding Seeking Faith: An Introduction to Religion in David Foster Wallace’s Life
• 1 Came to Believe: The Religion of AlcoholicsAnonymous in Infinite Jest
• 2 A Less “Bullshitty” Way to Live: The Pragmatic Spirituality of David Foster Wallace
• 3 “Not Another Word”: Nietzsche, Wallace, and the Death of God
• 4 In G.O.D. We Trust: The Desert of the Religious in The Broom of the System
• 5 “Saying God with a Straight Face”: Towards an Understanding of Christian Soteriology in Infinite Jest
• 6 Infinite Jest, C.S. Lewis’s Tao, and Religious Community
• 7 “Somewhat Lost and Desolate Inside”: Overcoming Acedia in The Pale King
• 8 “The Moral Equivalent of War”: Fungible Transcendentals in The Pale King
• 9 A Spoon, Some Eskimos, and the Wise Old Fish: Religion and the Evolution of Wallace’s Kenyon Commencement Address
• 10 David Foster Wallace and Postsecularism
• 11 “There’s Always a Mormon Around When You Don’t Want One”: What Wallace Can Teach the Church Media Machine
• 12 Zen Buddhist Philosophy Lurking in the Work of David Foster Wallace
• Conclusion: The Religious Worlds of David Foster Wallace—Both Fiction and Not
• Index
• Imprint