D&K's well-deserved reputations caused a wave of interest in All Things Shining, and it was a happy surprise to find a long, or long-ish, treatment of David Foster Wallace at the beginning of the book. Wallace had philosophical training and his work shows it. Philosophy is simply everywhere in Wallace's corpus, from a passing reference to Berkeley in an essay about the Illinois State Fair to a final unfinished novel (The Pale King) that lives, mostly, in the intersection of ethics and the philosophy of mind. Pale King is about boredom, concentration, how we extract information from the world and then organize it, and a whole cluster of related topics. It's no challenge to see why Wallace drew the attention of D&K: here is a brilliant writer discussing, in a distinctly philosophical way, the structure of our world and how our minds have to be hooked up to it in order for us to live well and meaningfully.
By the end of the chapter it is clear why D&K treated him in chapter two, before Homer, Dante, Kant, and Melville: their Wallace is an extreme against which other views are to be tested. Their Wallace is a nihilist, and their project is to illuminate past and present alternatives to nihilism.
But Wallace was not a nihilist, and the Wallace of All Things Shining is not Wallace at all. Mistakes abound. Rather than treating D&K's chapter as a punching bag, I'll confine myself here to a brief discussion of a central interpretative mistake and a few peripheral ones.
The Pale King is a fractured, expansive set of narratives that is organized around a set of IRS employees in 1970's and '80's Illinois. Over and over again we read that their work is boring. The interviews for their jobs largely consist in filtering out those who are not capable of focusing on such boring tasks; the boredom of the work drives one character out of his mind, whereupon he has hallucinatory visions of a man who discusses in detail the history of the word boring; there are long explanations of the sort of qualities one has to have to tolerate boredom and ultimately not to experience things as boring in the first place.
Although D&K do not say much about boredom in Wallace, it's clear that those last explanations are important to them, because their Wallace is a champion of the idea that we can, at least as a theoretical ideal, radically transform our capacities of focus and interpretation. Wallace did in fact hold such an ideal; but D&K misunderstand and overextend it. For D&K, Wallace held that "there are literally no constraints whatsoever to the meaning we can construct out of our experiences;" also, that human bliss is "generated solely by the individual will," that ecstasy "takes you out of this world and into an infinitely better one," and that "we are the sole active agents in the universe, responsible for generating out of nothing whatever notion of the sacred and divine there can ever be."
Wallace simply did not think these things, and his work does not present such a picture of human excellence or spirituality. D&K present almost no evidence for this claim: for the stuff about spirituality and atheism, they give us a single line of Infinite Jest: "Unless you're Charlton Heston, or unhinged, or both, God speaks and acts entirely through the vehicle of human beings." For the stuff about constructing any meaning at all out of experience, they present bits of Wallace's Kenyon College commencement address, where he claimed that one can "experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars..."
Wallace left us three novels (two if you don't count Pale King), a whole bunch of nonfiction, and maybe half a dozen very substantial interviews. If D&K have given us a couple pebbles of evidence for their view, there are whole mountains opposed to them. Moreover, I doubt any serious reader of Wallace would even see those passages as evidence for the D&K's nihilistic picture. Infinite Jest is a huge, multivocal novel, and the line they cite is from a list of lessons one learns at a halfway house (D&K don't mention that--they just attribute the line to Wallace). And the narrator there doesn't even say that God doesn't exist. Nor does the Kenyon address ever say or imply that you can interpret any given experience however you want.
Remarkably, at one point D&K quote one of Wallace's notes ("Bliss--a second-by-second joy and gratitude at the gift of being alive, conscious--lies on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom.") on Pale King, and a few pages later claim that "there is no sense whatsoever in Wallace that the 'sacred' moments of existence are gifts, so there is no place for gratitude." It is possible to make those statements consistent, but all such possibilities seem to me badly to contort Wallace. My best guess is that D&K simply had other Wallace texts in mind when they wrote the latter, but I can't be sure.
The picture Wallace was developing at the end of his career was not one in which "the strong individual's force of will" is the "lone source of meaning." Strong will and immense mental powers are central to the ideal we find in Pale King and various other sources, but those are preconditions of the right kind of experience, not the sole generators of it. D&K discuss the Pale King character Mitchell Drinion, who can focus so hard he levitates, but they misinterpreted Drinion. (Note that All Things Shining was written before Pale King was published, so this is more a general failure to get Wallace right than a gross misreading of Pale King, as readers might suspect if they don't keep the chronology in mind.)
We see the most of Drinion in a long passage near the end of the novel: the IRS examiners are out at a bar/restaurant after work, and he is in a conversation with Meredith Rand, who is discussing her history of mental illness and how she met her husband. Drinion is obviously here at his focused best: he levitates higher and higher as the conversation progresses. Here is a representative passage:
Drinion continues to look directly at Rand but without any sort of challenge or personal agenda. Rand, who is certainly in a position to know that guilelessness can be a form of guile, will tell Beth Rath that it was a little like having a cow or horse look at you: Not only did you not know what they were thinking as they looked at you, or if they were thinking at all--you had no sense of what they were even really seeing as they looked, and yet at the same time you felt yourself truly seen.
Drinion's is emphatically not a soul that constructs all its meanings entirely out of itself, and his freedom is not the freedom to experience anything as anything. Drinion's gifts are attention, focus, and discipline: those allow him to experience other things properly. To become like Drinion is to become maximally receptive to the world, rather than to replace it with whatever is generated within oneself.
I'm not totally sure how to fill in the details of the human excellence Drinion exemplifies--to do that is perhaps the biggest challenge facing good readers and Wallace scholars in the aftermath of Pale King's publication and Wallace's death. Getting this right, though, will require us to move far away from D&K's picture. Wallace was no nihilist: note the irony that "nihilism" is an important concept in Pale King, but it is entirely pejorative: it figures centrally in a different IRS examiner's (Chris Fogle's) story of leaving his immature adolescent and collegiate self behind and finding his redemption in accounting and tax. What is "nihilistic" there is the self-absorbed, quasi-intellectual, lazy world of the pre-IRS Fogle. A full account of nihilism (as Wallace uses the term) is another task than mine here, but here are two short excerpts from this episode in Pale King:
...At the time, I was aware only of the concrete impact of the announcer's statement, and the dawning realization that all of the directionless drifting and laziness and being a 'wastoid' which so many of us in that era pretended to have raised to a nihilistic art form, and believed was cool and funny [...] was, in reality, not funny, not one bit funny, but rather frightening, in fact, or sad, or something else--something I could not name because it has no name. I knew, sitting there, that I might be a real nihilist, and that it wasn't always just a hip pose. That I drifted and quit because nothing meant anything, no one choice was really better. That I was, in a way, too free, or that this kind of freedom wasn't actually real...
What [the Advanced Tax teacher] seemed to be was 'indifferent'--not in a meaningless, drifting, nihilistic way, but rather in a secure, self-confident way.Here's the irony: D&K's mistaken view of Wallace's goal and ideal resembles, more than anything else, not that goal and ideal of Wallace but the states (which Wallace did think are nihilistic) against which that goal and ideal is defined. The path to virtue begins with the rejection of the view that everything of value is contained within oneself. The heroes of Pale King are, remember, tax examiners. They cannot do their jobs except by being deeply and continuously tuned into the facts of the world, which they must accurately assess. If these are portraits of heroism, Wallace could not have been describing a human ideal of the sort D&K outline, and any careful reading of Wallace will show that the passages above are only small parts of the mountains of evidence against D&K's view.
Even if D&K's first chapters are untenable as a view of Wallace, they might be entirely successful as stepping-stones to their picture of the good life. I don't know whether they are, but I hope so. The first two chapters of All Things Shining are full of interesting and stimulating references: to Hamlet, to Melville, to Beckett, to Dante, to Martin Luther, and far beyond. I'll be curious to see what good readers (and experts of the objects of those references) have to say about D&K's bigger project here.
Perhaps Wallace is to D&K what Wittgenstein is to Kripke: a genius with a sprawling corpus, to be polished up and sanded down into an intelligible target of analysis. But those of us who count Wallace among our intellectual heroes, and who find so much philosophical interest (not to mention pleasure and fun) in his work, would prefer that the distortions be acknowledged as such.
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