In his weekly column "Intellectual Affairs", on Inside Higher Ed, Scott McLemee describes an encounter with some of Wallace's archive at the University of Texas, and a small book that is nothing more than a series of interviews with Wallace as he conducted that horrid grind many writers must endure, the book tour. It seems that Wallace endured this particular interruption of his life with something approaching full consciousness not only of its absurdity, but the way it was actually a part of all he was writing against. The entire piece is a marvelous addition to a growing body of work that attempts to do justice to the contradictory nature of Wallace's life and early death at his own hands.
Unlike, say, Hemingway, whose entire life and work seemed to move, with the gift of hindsight, toward the moment he took the gun and put it in his mouth, Wallace's lifelong battle with depression, his earlier attempts at suicide do not seem presaged in his work. While one could, I suppose, look to passages of personal reflection such as those Scott highlights as a kind of testimonial Wallace is preparing, a statement of his own sense of his place in the great cultural game of which he is a part and toward which he has mixed feelings, I think that is wrong. Or, if not wrong, perhaps being far too reductive.
I was struck - in fact, thunderstruck - by a quote Scott uses to close out his column. For all his intelligence, his genius, Wallace refuses to reserve for himself or any writer a place of honor in our culture.
What writers have is a license and also the freedom to sit – to sit, clench their fists, and make themselves excruciatingly aware of the stuff that we’re mostly aware of only on a certain level. And that if the writer does his job right, what he basically does is remind the reader of how smart the reader is. Is to wake the reader up to stuff that the reader’s been aware of all the time. And it’s not a question of the writer having more capacity than the average person. It’s that the writer is willing I think to cut off, cut himself off from certain stuff, and develop ... and just, and think really hard. Which not everybody has the luxury to do. But I gotta tell you, I just think to look across the room and automatically assume that somebody else is less aware than me, or that somehow their interior life is less rich, and complicated, and acutely perceived than mine, makes me not as good a writer. Because that means I’m going to be performing for a faceless audience, instead of trying to have a conversation with a person.
For myself, I can only add a humanist "Amen". The best writers do not assume they have some kind of plenary indulgence, but offer what they have in full knowledge that it has all been said before; all they are doing is taking the picture apart and putting it together in a way that makes sense to them. When they do their job right, readers say, "Yeah, that makes sense." Treating your audience like a bunch of morons who should be kowtowing at the feet of their wisdom and insight is a sure way to have one's books end up in the remaindered shelf.
I for one rarely assume my readers or commenters are dumber than I*. "[T]rying to have a conversation" is as good a description of what's going on here as anything. Even novelists are just doing that, and Wallace understood that.
Reading these words, and knowing that the person who said them, who lived them is no longer with us makes me very sad for our collective loss.
*There are exceptions, of course. Those who have proved, through repeated experience, they really aren't that bright I will indeed call out as such. For the most part, though, I assume that anyone reading this is at least as smart as I am, if not a great deal more so.
