notes on a rookie never succeed without an awareness and acknowledgement of race and class. If Rookie can’t do these things, what can it do? w/r/t DFW A Critical Inquiry WORKS CITED Julia M. H. Sizek Cixous, Hélène. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” The Portable Cixous. Ed. Marta Segarra. New York: Columbia UP, 2010. hooks, bell. Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. Boston, MA: South ne humid summer day in Dayton, Ohio, I waited for a ride out- Julia Sizek side a vertical wind tunnel and read Infinite Jest. I clearly looked is a fourth- End, 1984. O year in the absurd standing in the 90-degree-95-percent-humidity heat, read- College majoring in –––––. Wounds of Passion: A Writing Life. New York: Henry Holt, 1997. ing such a weighty book. One could say I looked equally absurd as anthropol- I did walking into my all-male-all-engineer office (with one notable ogy. Moore, Bre. “DEAR ROOKIE.” Rude Girl Mag. Posted Jan. 8, 2013. exception). That infinite summer was the beginning of my obsession Accessed Jan. 25. rudegirlmag.wordpress.com/2013/01/08/dear- with David Foster Wallace (DFW). I know that I’m just one among rookie millions of zealous DFW readers, but since that first encounter, this obsession has determined my movement through libraries and book- –––––. “I Need Your Help.” Rude Girl Mag. Posted Sep. 17, 2012. stores, kept me in long discussions at almost-vacant parties, and be- Accessed Feb. 5. rudegirlmag.tumblr.com/post/31744704937/i- come a justification for almost every book I recommend. need-your-help DFW’s death in 2008 and his accompanying pseudo-sainthood Trong, Stephanie. “Tavi Gevinson Explains Her New Website, helped fuel the ascent of his posthumous novel The Pale King onto the Rookie.” New York Magazine. Published Sept. 5, 2011. Accessed bestseller lists in 2011, and D.T. Max’s post-mortem Wallace biogra- Feb. 8, 2013. nymag.com/thecut/2011/09/tavi_gevinson_ex- phy, Every Love Story is a Ghost Story, was in the running to be a “Top plains_her_new.html 10 Book of the Year” in 2012. As Jonathan Franzen, DFW’s friend and literary competitor, puts it, “his suicide took him away from us and Zambreno, Kate. Heroines. Cambridge, MA: Semiotext(e) Active made the person into a very public legend. People who had never Agents, 2012. read his fiction, or even heard of him, read his Kenyon College com- mencement address in The Wall Street Journal and mourned the loss of a kind and gentle soul.”1 Within this public discourse, DFW became a strange sort of hero. Franzen, of course, argues that this interpre- tation is false, and that the David he knew was a deeply ambiguous figure—a complex, un-unified character. 1. Wallace 2012: 38. 30 31 w/r/t dfw julia sizek Inevitably, news coverage of a person’s death will be laudatory, ing pure spectacle—we find them fascinating without two-dimensional, and one-sided. It will gloss over his tangible con- recognizing their humanity. To envision someone as a tributions to society or thought, instead focusing on aspects of the spectacle, then, is to deny him the possibility of being person as a character in the world.2 Though this may explain the normal. The person-as-myth is somehow cordoned off transformation of man into myth, it does not justify it. In these pages from society and relegated to the madhouse of public I hope to put aside the man as a myth, and use DFW’s work as a jump- legend. ing-off point to discuss the world around us. Through DFW’s notion of critical engagement, we can challenge our ideas about other peo- This embodiment of the obsessed, the addicted, ple and the world around us, including our framing of DFW himself. the not-exactly-functional, is exactly what David Foster Wallace does.4 Infinite Jest is full of charac- People often find appealing the image of the tortured and self- ters unfathomable to the ‘normal’ human, from immolating artist: By suffering for art, the artist does something that the tennis prodigy and genius Hal Incandenza 3 we average people cannot. Suffering marks an artist and her work to the wheelchair-bound Québécois separatist Bildungsroman— with an air of immortality. For example, The Bell Jar was not particu- Marathe. While they share common desires—to in the fickle sense larly well-received until it was published under Plath’s name and love, to be free, to be happy—they also have strange quirks that di- immortalized by her suicide. The suffering and death of an artist, in vorce them from our experience of humanity.5 For example, we see part, makes him or her interesting and relevant alongside the sub- Hal in the opening scenes of Infinite Jest as an incomprehensible veg- stance of the work. For Plath and DFW, suffering is not ordinary, but etable, spoilt by the excesses of life and his myriad addictions. In the encounter between depression and genius. There is something an interview at an elite college, Hal sits mute. When asked a simple eerily attractive about mental illness when we only come into con- question, he replies with some sort of statement, but one that must tact with it fleetingly, just as a car accident on the highway causes be perceived as not only nonsense but “marginally mammalian” (15). a double-take. This metaphorical rubbernecking is also present His acts and words are such a cause for alarm that he is immediately in recent news coverage about gunmen in crowded movie theaters transported to the hospital. Presumably, his interview did not go well. and elementary schools. While our interest in these mentally ill in- But when reading this, we understand Hal while all those around him dividuals could be described as morbid curiosity, it is also aimed at cannot. Everyone else sees him as a babbling and incoherent vegeta- psychologizing the signs of their insanity. We are not interested in ble, yet the inner workings of his mind are revealed to us. While “di- getting to know these people as much as we want to know why they rected his way is horror,” Hal intends to say “I have opinions. Some are that way. They stop being people at some point, and start becom- of them are interesting. I could, if you’d let me talk and talk. Let’s talk 2. Note that DFW actually feared the coming of this image long before his death: He about anything. I believe the influence of Kierkegaard on Camus is wrote a letter to one of his friends saying that he was concerned that he had become a “Mask, underestimated…. I believe Hobbes is just Rousseau in a dark mirror” a Public Self, False Self or Object-Cathect” “that I want others to mistake for the real me” (12). While strange, he is not incomprehensible. This access to the (DFW quoted in Every Love Story is a Ghost Story, p. 240). mind is perhaps something only possible in fiction—there might be 3. Think of an athlete you admire (particularly, a marathoner you admire). As you no other way to understand the vagaries of the mind and break out of watch him race, you think, “Wow, I wish I were him—I’d be so fast, practically super- 6 human.” As you begin to seriously consider the implications of what you have just said, what DFW called “the encagement of the self.” Yet this access to the you realize 1.) how painful running a marathon at that speed is, and 2.) the requisite inaccessible is what we seek in news stories about homicidal rampag- training to run at that speed (a lot). Suddenly, you no longer wish to be him, because that is a lot of pain and suffering that you are pretty content without. A wish for em- 4. For a (slightly abbreviated) analysis of how this is so, see Franzen 2012. bodiment becomes admiration instead. This is the same kind of relation we have to Wallace 2006: 423. artists: We think they’re great and admire them, but value our normalcy enough that 5. we will not want to become a suffering artist. 6. Max 2012: 164 32 33 w/r/t dfw julia sizek Inevitably, news coverage of a person’s death will be laudatory, ing pure spectacle—we find them fascinating without two-dimensional, and one-sided. It will gloss over his tangible con- recognizing their humanity. To envision someone as a tributions to society or thought, instead focusing on aspects of the spectacle, then, is to deny him the possibility of being person as a character in the world.2 Though this may explain the normal. The person-as-myth is somehow cordoned off transformation of man into myth, it does not justify it. In these pages from society and relegated to the madhouse of public I hope to put aside the man as a myth, and use DFW’s work as a jump- legend. ing-off point to discuss the world around us. Through DFW’s notion of critical engagement, we can challenge our ideas about other peo- This embodiment of the obsessed, the addicted, ple and the world around us, including our framing of DFW himself. the not-exactly-functional, is exactly what David Foster Wallace does.4 Infinite Jest is full of charac- People often find appealing the image of the tortured and self- ters unfathomable to the ‘normal’ human, from immolating artist: By suffering for art, the artist does something that the tennis prodigy and genius Hal Incandenza 3 we average people cannot.