I am not David Foster Wallace

Sometimes, you spend fifteen years of your life trying to convince those around you of something they already believe, only to then discover that the reason you feel that you can’t is because you yourself don’t — ah well; it happens — we move.

I first learned of the late American writer David Foster Wallace shitting in my parent’s bathroom. Like his, my parents are academics, although his do English and Philosophy, and mine do Math and Physics. I don’t know whether his also have a small-to-midsize bookshelf in their bathroom, but in a big house in Austin, Texas, mine did — it was off this bathroom shelf that, at a rough 14, I first grabbed Consider the Lobster, Wallace’s second essay collection, published in 2005. It’s a good one. The first essay is about going to a porn convention, and it exhibits Wallace’s most profound strength as a writer: he’s strange. Likewise, it exhibits his most profound weakness: he feels bad about this.

There are many aspects of American culture that present themselves as aspects of American culture and not American Christian culture — our national literature is not exempt from this. I grew up Jewish in Austin, Texas, and one thing that taught me is those who grew up Jewish in more culturally hegemonic metropoles, like New York City, tend to see the ways Jews have shaped their local culture, then see these aspects of their local culture reflected in the national culture, and then think that Jews have done a better job assimilating into American society than I do. Non-Jews do this as well: they look at the culturally hegemonic metropole Jews and all that they’ve spread through the world — much 20th century American literature, “schmear”, finance capital, and so on — and conclude that, oh, y’all’ve already done more than enough, bless your Jewish little hearts. This is not helped by the fact that since October 7th, 2023, it has become excruciatingly clear that almost every single American in a position of any significant political power is willing to abandon any pretense of moral conviction they had to openly back the genocidal Israeli project as it exterminates Palestinian people, something they do more or less openly for the sake of maintaining their careers as Americans in positions of significant political power; even setting aside their more or less openly careerist support for an ongoing genocide, this was not exactly a vocation most associated with moral conviction to begin with, and so of course, this invites people who never really stopped believing antisemitic things to continue to believe that the roughly 0.2% of the world’s population claiming to be Jewish are all sitting on top of the world, rubbing our dirty little Jew hands together, and then gesticulating our way through all the decision-making that Makes Things Bad. All I can say is that it’s definitely not the whole 0.2%: I don’t believe in God, am very against the state of Israel, am sort of myself antisemitic albeit in a principled Marxist way, have a non-Jewish Spanish mother, and don’t regularly check my spam folder, so I may have missed the invite to the Secret Jewish Conspiracy Slack workspace, and thus do not have a more private way to add things to the agenda, so, please forgive me for doing this publicly, but: can we please finally convince American Christians that it’s okay to masturbate?

I was 13 when my dad handed me Philip Roth’s novel Portnoy’s Complaint with the prefatory statement that “this . . . is Great Literature.” When I arrived, a few pages in, at the section entitled “Whacking Off,” promptly read the rest of the book, most of which is about whacking off, and then confronted my dad about the great work of whacking off literature I had just read, he seemed sheepish; he claimed to have forgotten what the book was about. This is hard for me to imagine, as though I have long since accepted that certain aspects of Math Brain elude me, short of titling the book “Whacking Off” . . . well, it comes up often enough that I can tell you he is still sheepish — why, I don’t really know: I had the internet, and Roth writes better than most of those cinematographers shoot. At any rate, I haven’t gone back to reread Portnoy’s Complaint since I was 17, but here’s what I remember: there’s a Jewish guy named Alex (n.b., at this time, I was a Jewish guy named Alex) who comes of age in a moment in which American Judaism is figuring out how to assimilate into American Christian society; he wants to do good for the world (viz. tikkun olam); he wants to and kind of does fuck everything (n.b., famously, liver); he wants to be Jewish; he doesn’t want to be Jewish; he is confused. Many are! What’s helped me is to accept that it’s okay to feel good about yourself as long as you are doing good things with your life. Everything else will follow. (Pretty sure!)

Anywho, back to David Foster Wallace. David Foster Wallace was not Jewish; he isn’t particularly religious either, in the sense of really writing about God, but culturally, he is a part of that strain of American Christianity that makes real self-love difficult. The Jewish Biblical figure Moses once came down from the mountain with stuff the Jewish Biblical God told him about how to be alive, and this is sort of how being 29 feels for me: self-love is not about thinking that you are a good person, and in fact, it does not involve evaluating your self at all; it’s mostly about trust: it is about trusting yourself enough to keep your engagement with your own self open-ended and fluid and so thus genuinely understanding and living your life knowing that the project of living your life, and your responsibility to that project, only ends when you die — David Foster Wallace died hanging himself in his garage at the age of 46.

I bring up his suicide in this jarring way both for literary effect — to recreate what I imagine it felt like for his followers at the time — but also because I think it’s important to think about the fact that David Foster Wallace killed himself. Many do not. Many vehemently oppose this line of thinking. Sometimes they deploy the French in service of justifying this decision by invoking the concept of “the death of the author,” though usually not with much real attention paid to what is actually said in its namesake essay. I think when most people do this, it is a way of rationalizing what Marxists sometimes call “commodity fetishism,” a concept we don’t need to go into here except to say that structural features of capitalist economies invite you to ignore workers and only think about what they produce, meaning that many forget that writers live in the real world and are real people and think about real things and are presumably writers because they believe that writing — the thing they are really dedicating their lives to — is a real thing. I understand some people get excited about being invited to things, as I do too, sometimes, so I genuinely have no issue with those who reduce something as complex and diverse as the global literary tradition to a collection of objects that make them feel good, as long as they understand that that is what they are doing and can respect others have different relationships to the global literary tradition, and that one such relationship may involve using something as complex and diverse as the global literary tradition to approach the question of how to be alive. If you have read any of David Foster Wallace’s work, you can see that he did this, and so the fact that he choose to end his life is significant, more so if you like to read authors on their own terms.

David Foster Wallace’s work is largely unified around the idea that literature does things. Many people who like David Foster Wallace do not like the 2005 commencement address he gave at Kenyon College, now titled “This is Water.” One of David Foster Wallace’s most passionate and insightful readers is his fellow author Zadie Smith, who has a good essay about him in her book Changing My Mind, where she makes the point that “This is Water” is too easy: it is missing the point to see Wallace as the “dispenser of convenient pearls of wisdom” instead of as the hardass-but-loving pedagogue forcing his readers through the formally, even physically, exhausting works like Infinite Jest. She is right, but I think “This is Water” becomes Wallace’s most difficult literary work when you restore it to its original context: this was not meant to be an essay you can put down or a YouTube video you can pause but a speech that you could, but really should not, stand up during and walk out of. Wallace begins the speech by making explicit the expectations of the genre, meaning he knows, then, that he is supposed to say something palatable and vaguely inspiring to the crowd of mostly bored college students and families who just want to celebrate themselves and their kids; he is not supposed to use his considerable artistic skill to effectively tell those socially captive that if they don’t learn how to think, they will kill themselves. He was not supposed to then kill himself.

If you want to know more about him, I recommend you read everything he’s written. This is not an essay about David Foster Wallace; this is an essay about me, Isabel Pabán Freed. Like Wallace, I use an extra name to pay tribute to my mother, and like Wallace, I think a lot about the stuff David Foster Wallace thought about. But I also think that had the real David Foster Wallace happened to have had all of the same real life experiences that I’ve had, including the one of my biology, and thus think exactly like me, she would’ve written things that I — Isabel Pabán Freed — personally find a lot more exciting, so, here is what I have learned about trying to be David Foster Wallace: getting those big round bookish girl glasses, and growing your hair out, and dressing sort of like a lesbian, and acting sort of like a lesbian, and getting pretty into syntax is all cool stuff he did, I think, and whether he wanted to then take the next step and actually become a syntax lesbian, I don’t know and no longer care to find out, because regardless, I did — and I submit to you that this is actually literally what being alive is all about, what art is about, what being an intellectual is about, and rather than collecting the scooped-out brains of all the writers we’ve read and displaying them in our little intellectual display cases like trophies, being a real intellectual means finding all the other real intellectuals you love, dead or alive, and making them speak through you and your experiences and the concrete particularities of your life. And I’ll submit to you that David Foster Wallace — MFA, University of Arizona, ‘87 — understood the necessity of “finding your own voice” as well as just about any other writer in the whole literary tradition, and so — despite the many things I don’t like, and even hate, about this man — in the interest of finally being freed, I will submit: I am not David Foster Wallace.