The David Foster Wallace "Industry"
David Foster Wallace's novel The Pale King is set to be posthumously published on April 15th, which means that it's about time to power up the literary hype machine. What's remarkable, though, according to David Friedlander of The New York Observer, is that there is no Wallace hype machine: Wallace's hype proceeds from the bottom up, generated by thousands of impassioned fans on the internet, who are leading the way with their Wallace criticism.
Wallace committed suicide in 2008, after a lifelong struggle with depression; at the time, Freedlander writes, his literary reputation was far from assured, resting almost entirely on a small number of nonfiction essays and one novel, the 1,088 page Infinite Jest, which had been published more than a decade earlier. After his death, however, his long-standing internet fan base set about guaranteeing his place in the canon. Fan websites like The Howling Fantods (named after a phrase from Infinite Jest, meaning something like "the willies") posted his uncollected writing, solicited vast quantities of criticism, and even worked to recruit new fans (through, for example, a "New to DFW" frequently asked questions page). Increasingly, academic literary critics are writing about Wallace. But they're joining a pre-existing fan network, rather than creating one by, say, teaching him in their college courses. (None of this sounds much like an "industry" to me -- blame a sensationalistic headline for that one.)
Freedlander sees many reasons for the posthumous surge in Wallace's reputation: his early and tragic death, obviously, but also his nerdiness, which seems tailor-made for inspiring grass-roots internet excitement. Freedlander quotes D. T. Max, a journalist who's written about Wallace in The New Yorker; Max suggests that Wallace "connects very strongly with men, especially young men, and especially IT men, the kind of guys who would be into sci-fi and that kind of thing.... These guys need writers, they need cultural figures and they need guys who help them understand their role in the culture." It's for reasons like that, Freedlander argues, that Wallace has such a devoted online following, while other writers -- Cormac McCarthy, say, or Jonathan Franzen -- don't.
There's a more obvious explanation, to my mind: David Foster Wallace was actually a great novelist, and Infinite Jest was one of the most unique, and possibly the best, American novel of the last two decades. People love Wallace because he was a genius, and because he wrote about American life better than anyone else. The Observer's story sees Wallace as "big business," and that's certainly true. But before he was big business, Wallace was a big thinker; in his combination of analytical rigor and empathetic fervor, he recalled Dostoevsky. (Dostoevsky is big business, too.)
What does the future hold for Wallace's reputation? It depends on how good The Pale King turns out to be, and on how much it ends up counting as finished work (it's been put together, after his death, from drafts Wallace left in his garage). But it also depends on how useful and accurate Wallace's view of life will seem twenty, thirty, forty, or fifty years from now. That will be determined as Wallace's work is taught, read, and re-read over the years. Lots of forgotten writers once inspired "cults"; what's happening now is just the beginning of a long process of reading, evaluation, and re-thinking.
