Book Review: "Oblivion" by David Foster Wallace

Being a life-world portrait of an extremely mentally-ill man

The strength of a soul is its capacity for transformation to achieve what the will projects, its greatness is its power to do noble and beautiful acts even in the face of pain and danger. An artistic soul makes itself known by taking in the fair and foul stuff of life, and like the bee make sweet honey out of sweet flowers, or like the spider spin a lovely and elegant silvery web out of filthy insects.

Oblivion was not hard to read because its form is good, but it was hard to review because its content is so wretched. Written with a literary talent manifest on every page, the quality of its form gives harsh relief to the poverty and the distress of the mind that made it. These eight stories examine from individual angles the same problem and the impression given by the whole is a sort of unitary testimony of society as DFW saw it. Obviously this impression is an artistic, aesthetically curated, and not a documentary one pretending to verisimilitude. But this should in no way cause us to think that this book was a mere literary exercise. On the contrary, it is a very deeply sincere book that had to be told artistically because what it depicts is so horrible, so nightmarish.

In retrospect, all the narrators and all the narratives blend into one another. The theme carried throughout, against which the different styles of the short stories play counterpoint, is one of severe mental illness and spiritual disease.

The theme of Oblivion is aggravated narcissism. Narcissism is distinct from egoism: an egoist is a person who is satisfied by the achievement of his desire. A narcissist is a person besieged by constant anxiety and insecurity stemming from inability to control how others see him.

The major theme of Infinite Jest, DFW’s most famous work, was addiction, and IJ is a much, much less irritating book to read than the present work. The large cast of characters of IJ at the peripheries of normalcy, depicting teenage athletes, artistic or scientific geniuses, active and recovering drug addicts, terrorists and state security personnel, and its consistently humorous tone and the satirically zany setting, worked very well in balancing the supersentimental morality which was the beating heart of that novel. This polarity made it stand out, and it still seems unique to me in literature, as satires tend either to a bitter nihilism or to a simple and straightforward stance for manly good: I couldn’t name another writer or artist who married zaniness to lachrymose self-pity the way DFW did in Infinite Jest.

Here, he leaves periphery of normalcy to move to its centerstage in Oblivion, but stripped of the accoutrements so necessary to satire’s equippage, the “we truly do live in a lonely society” message, when communicated through characters fully invested with reason and responsibility becomes not only annoying and puerile in the worst way, but actually stupid.

Before we examine the stupidity of Oblivion, a glance back at by far the worst moment in Infinite Jest, a moment that predicted as a germ in 1996 what the fully developed sickness would become in 2004.

In IJ, the concept of a true and free bond is mocked and made fun of, where the only character who loves another¹ does it in a completely parodically irrational way. He decides to “love” a woman without a skull, not because he feels love because he simply “decides” that it is better to force himself to be devoted to another person without reason or cause than to give into his suicidal desire. This joke is not a mere joke, the reason for it is that the depiction of a strong and healthy individual with both levity and seriousness would cast a shadow on all the characters through which the argument and the action of the novel springs. A rationally good and joyful human relationship would expose all the postures of “woe is me” and “i’m so extremely alienated” as things not profound but shallow, as conditions not inextricable from modern life but a sickness for which there is a cure. Only when there is no such people i.e. a man or a woman with a good beautiful soul, does the drama of the self-absorbed people become plausible or compelling.

And but so therefore on the one hand DFW is both honest enough and intelligent enough that he does not externalize his psychological problems: he will not be caught dead blaming “capitalism” or “patriarchy” and/or conjucture a utopia of perfect freedom where there won’t be any frustration or diffidence etc. etc. And this probity he displays, though he is in the depths of despairs, draws some applause from me.

Yet but although and so on the other it feels like he has been in such a ideologically sealed straightjacket his whole life that he cannot bring himself to see the solution that is so easy to see. His unexamined axioms prevent him from the easiest and most straightforward self-help possible. The experience of reading Oblivion was as if I was watching a six foot tall man slowly drown to death in three feet deep water. He refuses to stand up. If only he stood up and grew a backbone could he condemn the life and times he was born into simply as bad and botched. And it is not only “muh humanity,” “muh emotions,” “muh equality” etc. that disables him from raising himself above this knee-deep troubles, it is his absolute and unconditional refusal to consider the possibility that as privileged as he may be, what he was privileged to possess, his education, his station in society, were not good things to possess. He could never deprecate himself! Or rather, he could never consider himself as a man separate from what he considers and internalizes as his “white male privileges.” So you see, the ideological straightjacket worked two ways: first it taught him that things that were so manifestly bad he should consider to be good, and second that he must always consider himself superior and better in the most important way to everybody else. If it was just one or the other, he could have come to terms with his lot in life, but having both principles and holding unto them as their tension grew in a feedback loop eventually suffocated David Foster Wallace. So he went ahead deeper and deeper into his depression and into an useless and reasonless early grave because he could not think his way through the paper bag he was in.

One last thing before the discussion of the short stories is to say what is absent in this lifeworld depicted with such care and art: no beautiful friendships exist. Friendship redeems every suffering we undergo, and with it we surmount every difficulty. I have no reason to believe that DFW ever had real friend. A metonym for friendship (the family you choose) is the family. A good and true family relationship is never depicted. Where these things are absent, any human universe must be a comfortless and shoddy dwelling place in which why any thing matters at all will not find any answer.

Mister Squishy

Shows the irrepresible human spirit, that nevertheless distorts and degenerates under artificial conditions. The skilfully plied layers of the story crescendo and reveal the fakeness of the marketing data business but also how the people inside it are only pretending to be a part of it willingly and enthusiastically while they are still human beings with normal human desires which they suppress and express in a variety of ways. It is more about the acting adults must do in their corporate professional lives and how it inhibits them, than it is about marketing as such. Partially told through the eyes of a caponized man who going crazy in his self-imposed restraint and lashes out at the external restraints with catastrophic disproportionality.

He makes a pair with the character from the subsequent story Good Old Neon. Mister Squishy’s impotent male cannot conceive that he might want something and then act on it and that this is normal, therefore he has to portray to himself that he would obtain what he wants as a sideproduct of “helping others” (both sexually and professionally), contra the Good Old Neon character who is equally impotent although he always gets what he “wants” (but of course he doesn’t “want” anything, his inner world is pure social reflexivity, there is no self he can fall back on and examine things from). There is no paradox because both men are narcissistic, one simply has the genetic-economic advantage, but neither know what to do at all, they do not act, they can’t conceive of themselves as acting and being responsible for what they’ve willed.

The Soul Is Not A Smithy

By far the best story overall, for the reason that the narrator is not the mentally-ill party, but someone who was a child lost in a daydream as the action was happening, and the way the daydream and the mentally-ill teacher are conflated in the narration is wonderfully executed.

However, there is one specific line that intrudes and annoys, which is a comment the adult narrator makes about the police killing the teacher because “they were afraid” and the way the story is meant to have a emotional climax for the reader at that line.

You have to understand that it is not that the policemen killed the teacher that is meant to be significant, but that the policemen felt fear.

But this is only because David Foster Wallace came from an oversocialized and feminized world where having the approved opinion is the most important thing, where people stress about being ostracized over not having “a good look” over something they said or did or abstained from saying or doing (basically a minature bolshevik society where they eat each other over unorthodoxy) which causes these uneducated-but-believing-themselves-to-be-educated people to put their foot in their mouth so often, this line being an example of that.

For in this oversocialized and feminized worldview the servants are meant to be faceless automatons.

Because of course the police were afraid, they were in a fearful situation! It would be very bizarre if they weren’t afraid. And that is the little out of place detail that can unravel an entire worldview when you think about it properly, when you realize all the implications and corollaries of that sentence, the libtarded world that one must inhibit in order to write that and publish it and think it is a profound statement on humanity. For the privileged American libtards are extremely uncomfortable outside their greenhouse world and the idea that people who they see as the faceless automaton enforcers of their rule being human and having opinions and emotions of their own unnerves them, for they’ve been busy demonizing the people they rule over and harming them, and one day the arrear-chickens might come home to roost or be cashed.

Incarnations of Burned Children

At just three pages, this piece demonstrates best just how skilled DFW can be as a writer. The ability to write long sentences that both narrate an action as it unfolds within the sentence while finding the appropriate descriptive marks that make the picture of the scene come alive is a rare talent.

Being the shortest story, it is also the most definitive description of human existence as the author sees it. The way it relates to the whole of the book is this: why does this terrible suffering happen? The answer is that for no reason at all, it is just the way it is. The baby’s soul leaves but the body survives the accidental agony it suffers. And this is very important: nobody is at fault. These things just happen, and nobody can be held responsible for them. The baby is murdered spiritually by existence itself. The sun is a yoyo because all the days of its adult life are indistinguishable and bland.

The vision that arises from it is simple: life is a torture chamber.

Another Pioneer

After these three very technically accomplised pieces, here with the fourth story the quality of the book drops, and each story as it repeats the already thoroughly investigated theme has difficulty not becoming monotonous. As the previous story was about a human baby, this story is about society in its infancy, and just like the previous one it amounts to saying the problem is immanent to humanity and the past was not idyllic.

Good Old Neon

By far the worst and most unendurable piece² as it has all the bad qualities of DFW in their most concentrated form that I can hardly bring myself to discuss this execrable nadir of a man who I must define by the words “WASTED TALENT.”

The ending is so awfully full of moralic acid: the author-narrator-character (in one giant incestuous literary technique equivalent to public masturbation) finishes his story by effectively saying: “So you see I am very smart and the aforesaid explanations are actually the way the world is, however, I am simply making a heroic effort to ignore it and pretend to believe in the value or even the existence of goodness, even though I take pride in the skill with which I demoralize others and put them in pain.”

He is basically totally defined and exhausted through the simple and solitary principle he holds but will not confess to which is that he believes he is always the victim at a universal scale.

Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature

Here, instead of a pity-party we get humor and irony, which is good and fun.

Oblivion

This is a complex and subtle homage to David Lynch, and a nightmare form fits well with the banality of superficial people that ails DFW.

The Suffering Channel

In this story DFW’s usually high and well-tuned literary skill flags and falters and both the plot and the characters feel false. The Suffering Channel makes up a very little portion of the story, and is an obvious metaphor for the content of DFW’s art: he is the artist who uses his skill to show his audience human suffering. Instead, nine-tenths of the story is taken up with another plot which is an obvious metaphor for what DFW sees the artistic process as: human feces that come out in representational shapes, which is both disgusting and compelling. Trite observation: this metaphor is only applicable to David Foster Wallace’s art.

FINAL COMMENT:

One thing that very much feels like “The Return Of The Repressed” is all the mention of battles, war and combat ascribed to characters that do not properly appear in the stories themselves. “Iwo Jima” are the last words of The Soul Is Not A Smithy, and there are other mentions of World War 2 or the Vietnam War.

While this may seem unconnected to what the stories are about, they appear rather fitting to be the ghosts to haunt the superficiality of narcissism: a background that brings into relief the boredom of self-obsession.

read more of The Indo-European Friendship Club through the table of contents

1. This has been contradicted on the account that Don Gately and Joelle on the one hand, and Hal and Mario on the other loving one another, in addition to Mario naturally holding a lot of love for everyone. But this objection is only half-right. Joelle and Don only approach love and do not actually reach it in the plot itself (when he is hospitalized Don is still ashamed of his condition in front of Joelle), and Mario is a biological freak needing constant help and assistance to remain alive. Mario is not “a normal person” in anyway, although among the cast of characters he is the most spiritually healthy.

2. Not coincidentally, Good Old Neon is often mentioned to be a masterpiece and a favorite by morons, midwits, and people with no taste. What can I say to anyone who loves this terrible piece, other than: “quod erat demonstrandum”?