Depression and Dysphoria in the Fiction of David Foster Wallace

Rob Mayo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000300451
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Depression and Dysphoria in the Fiction of David Foster Wallace is the first full-length study of this critically overlooked theme, addressing a major gap in Wallace studies. Wallace has long been recognised as a 'depression laureate' inheriting a mantle previously held by Sylvia Plath due to the frequent and remarkable depictions of depressed characters in his fiction. However, this book resists taking Wallace's fiction at face value and instead situates close reading of his complex fictions in theoretical dialogue both with philosophical and theoretical texts and with contemporary authors and infl uences. This book explores Wallace's complex engagement with philosophical and medical ideas of emotional suffering and demonstrates how this evolves over his career. The shifts in Wallace's thematic focus on various forms of dysphoria, including heartache, loneliness, boredom, and anxiety, as well as depression, correspond to an increasingly pessimistic philosophy underlying his fiction.

Part I

‘Lovers and Propositions’

Wallace encouraged a dismissive view of his early works, and accordingly critics have considered them ‘pretentious juvenilia’ (Boswell 2003, 102). Elsewhere, gently chiding philosophy scholars for their ‘tend[ency] to schizofy Wittgenstein’ (1990, 86), Wallace himself took the same approach to his own work:

[W]‌hen I was in my twenties […] I really believed […] that the point of fiction was to show that the writer was really smart […] I don’t think I really understood what loneliness was […] I’ve got a much less clear idea [now] of what the point of art is but I think it’s got something to do with loneliness, and something to do with setting up a conversation between human beings […].

(Silverblatt 1996, 15:40)

Like the ‘schizofication’ of Wittgenstein, this view both accurately highlights a clear division in Wallace’s writing and potentially distorts the more complex relationship between the phases of his career. Wallace’s self-criticism may be sincere, but his disavowal of his early fiction belies how profoundly concerned both The Broom of the System and Girl with Curious Hair are with loneliness. As Wallace suggests, loneliness is a theme which remains in his fiction beyond the 1980s; he states in a later interview promoting Brief Interviews with Hideous Men that ‘everything that [he] write[s]‌ ends up being about [loneliness]’ (Silverblatt 1999, 3:15). Wallace’s 1980s fiction provides a conceptual groundwork for later examinations of depression and empathy, but in these works of ‘juvenilia’ loneliness is held in dualistic opposition to romantic love, a theme which is largely absent from his later work.

The two chapters which form this first part of the book examine how this dualism is explored and how it evolves between Wallace’s first novel and the short fiction published afterwards. In Wallace’s later works, the theme of loneliness remains prominent as it is presented as a symptom of depression, but here we have a more universal form of loneliness. Wallace uses words such as ‘loneliness’ and ‘lonely’ as part of a broad spectrum of terms which includes ‘solipsism’, a term which has a distinct and precise meaning in philosophical discourse. The primary OED definition for the term ‘lonely’ emphasises its etymological connections to the word ‘alone’: ‘[h]‌aving no companionship or society; unaccompanied, solitary, lone’. The fourth entry in the OED, referring to a dysphoric ‘feeling of solitariness’ [italics mine] analogous to dejection or sadness, is that which is most congruent with the theme explored here. The words ‘lonely’ and ‘alone’ are somewhat interchangeable in general usage, denoting either solitariness or the dysphoria associated with it. Wordsworth’s famous narrator ‘wander[ing] lonely as a cloud’, for example, is solitary but not necessarily dejected; the poem’s later tenor is ‘the bliss of solitude’ (619–20) when the narrator reflects on the memory of the daffodils. While Wordsworth uses ‘lonely’ to refer to a state of isolation, however, Wallace’s uses of ‘alone’ and ‘lonely’ tend to denote the dysphoric feeling. Despite the conceptual association of solitariness and loneliness, however, there is no robust connection. Just as one might ‘feel lonely in a crowd’ (Girl 309), one might experience solitude without any attending dysphoria of loneliness.

To define love is, in Roland Barthes’s analysis, a fool’s errand.¹ The chapters which form this first section do not contradict Barthes on this, but instead establish the parameters and principles of Wallace’s concept of love. In both Wallace’s first novel and short story collection, the form of love depicted is consistently a romantic, sexual love; this is the category of eros, according to C. S. Lewis’s book on The Four Loves, and it is distinct from Platonic forms of love such as familial love (storge) and friendship (philia) (Lewis 42, 69, 106). The following chapters use Plato’s and Lacan’s theories of love to limn the forms of eros which are represented by Rick Vigorous in The Broom of the System and by a wide range of characters in Wallace’s contemporaneous short fiction. The stories in Girl with Curious Hair depict romance among heterosexual couples, gay men, and lesbians, but these various sexualities are united under a consistent concept of romance which holds mutuality of feeling and exclusivity as ideals. This reading refers to relationships which fail to fulfil these ideals as ‘dysfunctional’, but this is not intended to denote any kind of mental disorder or moral deviancy, nor as a commentary on forms of love such as polyamory which are not considered in Wallace’s work; instead, I use this term as a convenient shorthand for the way in which Wallace’s writing suggests an ideal of romantic love but typically denies its characters that ideal. One character in Girl with Curious Hair speaks of love in terms of ‘distance’, and via Plato and Lacan I consider love in Wallace’s work as a method of bridging the distance which Cartesian solipsism places between the experiencing subject and others. This is never an easy task in any of Wallace’s works, and much of Wallace’s writing in this period depicts the failure of interpersonal romance to achieve this ideal goal. The theme of love is most clearly expressed in Girl with Curious Hair, and while it is certainly not a monologic expression of romantic optimism, it is here that Wallace most clearly engages with this concept. The Broom of the System, in contrast, is more concerned with the unavoidable problem of loneliness.

Note

1In his consideration of ‘the ipseity’ of the loved object, that which makes it ‘adorable’ for the lover, Barthes finds only the ‘failure’ and ‘fatigue of language itself’ – ‘I adore you because you are adorable, I love you because I love you’ (20–1).

1The Broom of the System¹

In his glowing review of David Markson’s 1988 novel Wittgenstein’s Mistress, Wallace implies that his own 1987 debut novel, The Broom of the System, is ‘pretty dreadful’ (1988, 244).² Hayes-Brady declares that ‘[Wallace’s] first novel has been critically overlooked, with only sundry reviews and a single chapter in Marshall Boswell’s Understanding David Foster Wallace (2003) in its critical retinue’, but concedes that it is ‘less of a heavyweight [than] Infinite Jest’ (2010, 24). Although it predates Infinite Jest and The Pale King by 9 and 24 years respectively, its critical neglect remains evident. Of the seven novel-specific essays collected in David Foster Wallace and ‘The Long Thing’: New Essays on the Novels, six are about Wallace’s later novels; the seventh, by Bradley J. Fest, divides its focus between The Broom of the System and ‘Westward…’. The more recent Cambridge Companion to David Foster Wallace perpetuates this critical delineation, categorising The Broom of the System among the ‘early works, story collections, and nonfiction’ rather than among the ‘major novels’ (Clare 2018, vii–viii). To date, the novel remains one of the least-examined works in Wallace’s oeuvre.

This neglect is perhaps intentional, if readers share Wallace’s assessment of his own work. Alternatively, I suggest that criticism has been hindered by an approach to the novel which Wallace encouraged. Wallace argues that Wittgenstein’s Mistress by David Markson belongs to a category of fiction which includes ‘[Voltaire’s] Candide, Witold Gombrowicz’s Cosmos, Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game, Sartre’s Nausea [and] Camus’s The Stranger’, which are defined by their perceived attempts to ‘direct their own critical reading’ and signal ‘what [they are] “about”’ (1990, 74–5). Wittgenstein’s Mistress is emblematic of the ‘INTERPRET-ME phenomenon’ (75), Wallace suggests, because it is very clearly ‘about’ Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language. Wallace’s dismissal of The Broom of the System is predicated upon its status as a ‘fail[ed]’ attempt at ‘INTERPRET-ME fiction’ (74–5). Despite this proclaimed failure, the limited critical attention which it has received to date has primarily followed a critical reading which it ‘directs’; ‘clue[d]‌ in’ by its inclusion of a character who ‘studied [under] Wittgenstein’ and who possesses a prized ‘autographed’ copy of Philosophical Investigations, critics including Boswell, Kelly, and Randy Ramal have primarily approached the novel in terms of Wittgenstein’s theories of language and communication (Broom 40, 73).

The Broom of the System, a cartoonish comedy comprising various competing plotlines, undoubtedly fails to provide the ‘immediate study of depression and loneliness’ (1990, 78) which Wallace discovers in Wittgenstein’s Mistress. However, it is important here to distinguish, as Hayes-Brady does, between different types of failure (2016, 8–9). By declaring it a failure of the ‘INTERPRET-ME’ form, Wallace deceptively juxtaposes his novel with works by Voltaire, Camus, and Sartre, which are characteristically monologic. Wallace’s theory of this canon suggests that the first-person narration of Nausea, The Stranger, and Wittgenstein’s Mistress is in service to making clear their particular philosophies.³ Kelly identifies The Broom of the System as ‘overwhelmingly monologic’ (2014a, 7), highlighting how Lenore Beadsman remains near-silent in most ‘dialogues’ with other characters. It is in fact, I suggest, remarkably equivocal, switching between first-person narrator (Rick Vigorous), omniscient third-person narration, unattributed dialogue, and official transcripts. Rather than cover the already well-charted territory surrounding Lenore Beadsman and her relationship to Wittgensteinian philosophy, this chapter explores several aspects of the novel which have, to date, received scant critical attention. These overlooked elements illustrate the central importance of dysphoric loneliness in Wallace’s early fiction, and it is hoped that this reading opens up new points of entry into this complex novel.

I therefore begin this chapter by examining Rick and the disintegration of his romantic relationship with Lenore.⁴ Second, I contrast the stories which Rick tells to Lenore throughout the novel and the story which Lang, who supplants Rick in her affections, tells to her near the end of the novel. I consider these stories to perform the same metafictional role as parts of ‘Westward…’; these two texts are not merely metafictional in the sense that they foreground the apparatus of fiction, but rather that they specifically depict characters critiquing fictions.⁵ Finally, I consider aspects which are overlooked even in O’Donnell’s thorough catalogue of the novel’s ‘many other narrative grains and fragments’ (14): characters who are peripheral to the society depicted in the novel but who vividly represent Wallace’s thematic concern with loneliness. I also demonstrate how these characters are connected in ways which may not be immediately apparent. The supernatural connections uncovered provide an element of hopeful optimism in this otherwise pessimistic novel.

I

Max rejects the popular view that Wallace’s debut novel is a ‘Pynchon ripoff’, stating that, unlike the ‘emotionless’ work of Wallace’s forebear, ‘there is an ache in Broom. If on the surface even lighter than [The Crying of Lot 49], just a bit below it exudes discomfort and yearning’ (2012, 48).⁶ Max speculates that this emotional ‘ache’ is an expression of ‘Wallace’s anxiety, his fear of a world in which nothing is rooted, and his intense attempts to understand what women want and how to form a relationship with them’ (48; italics mine). Max’s interpretation is informed by the image which he creates of Wallace as a precocious yet insecure student, and while Max’s biography is thoroughly researched and indispensable for Wallace scholars this story of Wallace’s life should not dictate the meanings of his fiction. However, the ‘ache’ which Max identifies as revolving around the mysteries of ‘how to form a relationship’ is readily apparent in The Broom of the System even without knowledge of this biographical context, through the character of Rick. To speculate that Rick is a manifestation of Wallace’s adolescent tribulations would be as reductive as Wallace’s claim that The Broom of the System is a ‘self-obsessed bildungsroman’ which obfuscates its biographical origins by performing a ‘sex change’ (McCaffery, 41) to produce Lenore. However, Rick is the novel’s primary representation of dysphoric feeling, and warrants greater critical scrutiny than he has received.

We need first to understand the nature of the ‘ache’ which Max refers to. Although Rick is a distinct and memorable character with idiosyncratic tribulations, he is one of Wallace’s many characters whose suffering pertains to subjective loneliness and the elusive prospect of intersubjective connection. For Wallace, loneliness is an inherent and unavoidable symptom of life; he states in the McCaffery interview that ‘[w]‌e all suffer alone in the real world’ and that ‘true empathy’s impossible’ due to the fact that each person is ‘marooned in her[/his] own skull’ (22). The basis for this belief may be found in what Wallace calls the ‘loopy philosophical tradition’ of ‘the ontological priority of the Subject’ (1992b, 59). The philosophical discourse surrounding the concept of an interior and immaterial self, which expresses itself outwardly through speech and bodily movement, may be traced back to ancient thinkers such as Plotinus and Augustine. The foundational thinker for Wallace, however, is Descartes.⁷ The Cartesian subject is defined by Slavoj Žižek as ‘the self-transparent thinking subject’, a concept which ‘has dominated modern thought’ and remains ‘a powerful and still active intellectual tradition’ (1–2). This tradition derives from Descartes’s A Discourse on the Method. Pledging to ‘reject as completely false everything in which [one] could detect the least doubt’, Descartes arrives at the conclusion that while all thought might be ‘prone to error’ or even ‘the illusions of [one’s] dreams’, ‘it [is] necessarily the case that I, who was thinking them, had to be something’; hence the influential declaration, ‘cogito ergo sum’ – ‘I think, therefore I am’ (28).⁸

The Cartesian method of philosophical scepticism results in what Wallace would define as solipsism. Kasia Boddy suggests that the words ‘solipsism’ and ‘loneliness’ are often ‘simply’ synonymous in Wallace’s writing (41).⁹ While this may certainly be true in many instances, a more precise understanding of solipsism is necessary to comprehend the loneliness which afflicts Wallace’s characters who are ‘lonely’ but not literally isolated from others. One may thereby distinguish between instances of situational loneliness, whereby the subject is literally alone and experiences their want for company as a dysphoric feeling, and inherent loneliness, which is essential to the condition of subjectivity. Wallace’s image of his reader ‘marooned in her[/his] own skull’ also calls to mind the famous philosophical thought experiment of the ‘brain in a vat’, a contemporary version of Plato’s allegory of the cave or Descartes’s ‘malicious demon’. The underlying philosophical problem in such scenarios is what Bertrand Russell terms the ‘question […] of the independent existence of objects’ (7). The problem of verifying the existence of anything beyond the ‘sense-data’ received by the experiencing subject is one which Russell admits cannot be ‘strictly proved’, and the risk therefore remains of ‘be[ing] left alone in a desert – it may be that the whole outer world is nothing but a dream, and that we alone exist’ (7).¹⁰ The Cartesian subject which ‘reject[s]‌ as completely false everything in which [one] could detect the least doubt’ (28) and conceives of its own consciousness as the only thing which is truly known or knowable to it suffers this lonely fate. As one character states in ‘Westward…’, ‘[t]o be a subject is to be [a]lone’, and Wallace’s use of the term ‘solipsism’ in his work denotes a sustained interest in this form of inherent loneliness which may cause his characters to ‘feel lonely in a crowd’ (Girl, 304, 309).

Wallace names Philosophical Investigations ‘the single most comprehensive and beautiful argument against solipsism that’s ever been made’ and explains to McCaffery that his admiration for the book stems from Wittgenstein’s insistence ‘that for language even to be possible, it must always be a function of relationships between persons […] dependent on human community’ (44).¹¹ Much of the critical work done on Wallace’s early works – particularly The Broom of the System – has f...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I ‘Lovers and Propositions’
• Part II ‘This Logarithm of All Suffering’
• Part III ‘Custodian to the Statue’
• Conclusion: “It’s Like I Can’t Get Enough Outside It to Call It Anything”
• Bibliography
• Index