Infinite Jest: The politics of David Foster Wallace

One of the things I have come to realize about Infinite Jest is that it seems to have had a strong effort to keep out any type of political slant, as far as right wing vs. left wing goes. Which is somewhat surprising and unusual, since much of the book is about politics (although politics of a highly fantastic variety) and also because writers of literary fiction tend to be fairly leftist.

From what I have read of David Foster Wallace in other places, he did seem to be more conservative, in some ways, than the average American literary writer. This is actually fairly obvious from Infinite Jest, which is many ways a critique of social liberalness, at least in the sense of permissiveness. It could also be seen as religiously conservative.

Wallace was at least somewhat open to conservative political viewpoints, as evidenced by the fact that he wrote a fairly complimentary work on John McCain (although in 2000, when McCain was seen as a liberal Republican).

And I think this comes across in Infinite Jest: Johnny Gentle, FC is described specifically as a meeting of the fringe right wing and the fringe left wing, and the Canadian separatists are also a combination of leftist and rightist viewpoints. The AFR themselves are leftists, I believe it is mentioned, but some of their allies are phlangists. (Such as the CPCP)

I think that he did this on purpose, because it would have been very easy to write a book "preaching to the choir" about the evils of corporations and evangelicals and jingoistic statists, etcetera. I think that he specifically wanted to keep the typical politics out of it, because he was writing a work about the root causes of the culture's Disease, not its manifestations.

yes, interesting point. And I agree to the extent that the JOhnny Gentle sections seem to be poking fun at politics in general rather than any specific political point of view.

I think this is also why he was so careful to remove any historicity from the novel, insofar as politics and history are intertwined.

Other than the Kemp and Limbaugh administrations.

(Which also doesn't quite make sense if we take the book to have the chronology it is generally believed to, since Gentle became President in 2000, there wasn't time for two full presidential administrations before then, for a book written in 1994)

Wallace did hate Limbaugh, but he hated Limbaugh not so much for his politics, but because he was an Entertainer, and an Entertainer that used the very irony and dissembling that were invented by the counter-culture.

It's interesting, and you're right, Wallace does make his villains tough to categorize politically in IJ. Maybe it's sort of an everything-that-rises-must-converge situation...the more fanatical somebody gets, the more he or she looks like all the other fanatics out there.

I don't see IJ as a critique of social permissiveness, though. To me, it's not about the choices society lays before its citizens, it's about the way those citizens choose from those options, and then choose again, and then choose again, and again, and again.... It's about how Wallace suspected that finding real fulfillment means taking responsibility for things, as unpleasant as that might sound in the short term. As he said in an interview toward the end of his life, {slight paraphrase} "Most of the problems in my life are a result of my confusing what I want with what I need."

As for Wallace's own political beliefs, I'm not sure I've ever seen anything that would definitively indicate one way or another. All I got from the McCain essay was that Wallace (like most of the people I know) despises political cynicism, and that McCain seemed (at the time...) to actually believe in most of the stuff he was saying.

Somewhere I've seen an exchange of articles that he engaged in at Amherst, in the Amherst Student, over politics, where his rant was essentially a curmudgeonly "damn noisy politicos stop bothering me" kind of scree. I don't think he was terribly interested in or sophisticated about politics. Less interesting that logic puzzles or grammaratical questions.

5:
Gross mischaracterization!

"Do you know what I'm tired of? I'm tired of self-proclaimed "Conservatives" and "Progressives" shrilly grinding their respective axes on the opinion pages of the Student. The Student is to read at dinner, and this narrow, back-and-forth invective makes my stomach hurt. It's pretty much an axiom of life in the twentieth century that statistics and the testimony of interested witnesses can be used to argue just about any point, and so are largely useless in arguing with people who don't share your opinions right from the start. All their continued use shows is the troubling willingness of basically good-hearted people carefully to select (and so bend) facts to suit their own particular points of view.

...

"These guys on the opinion pages in the last couple of weeks haven't seemed to me to be interested in learning, or listening; they've been interested only in presenting single sides of grotesquely complicated questions as if theirs were the only real and complete answers. It solves nothing. It can at most persuade other people to speak shrilly and reject alternative points of view; at its least harmful I guess it's fun and stimulating for the writers. That last sentence means that what we've seen so far this year out of what are purported to be our most concerned and active students is at worst propaganda, and at best masturbation. I'd love just once to see a "Student" political column by someone who wasn't all-fired sure he was right."

That sums up most of what intelligent people agree is wrong with politics, I think.

I don't see the mischaracterization there! I will say that his column (I believe it was columns - he and someone else got into some back and forth) was certainly not one by someone "who wasn't all-fired sure he was right." But he also wasn't ready to engage in any of the substance of the debate, and so fought the existence of the debate itself.

His McCain piece spoke of a terribly naive approach to politics and an inability to separate the man and the carefully burnished image. I think he was taken in, that he realized that over time, and that he thus shied away from politics even more. Thinking of David as a political creature is just going down a dead end - any politics he got involved in was more accidental than deeply felt.

Plenty of intelligent people get deep into politics and fight for something despite any corruption of the process or doubts about the methods. David didn't do that - he didn't take a position and stand up for much of anything politically.

I think it is flat out wrong to think of him as a conservative. But I really do think he was fundamentally disinterested in politics, at least in the real world, so would be hesitant to apply any political label to him.

6> sounds like an apt description of LTs Pro & Con groups.

7:
I think taking that letter to the editor as evidence that he wasn't "sophisticated about politics" makes sense if you think Washington lobbyists epitomize political sophistication. That's certainly a valid point of view--there's undeniably a fairly sophisticated persuasion industry that's closely tied to contemporary politics--but it's not my point of view. So if Wallace wasn't interested in, or wasn't sophisticated about, that kind of politics, I guess I'm not either. If you think of politics more generally, eg, as "things relating to governance," then the theoretical possibilities open up a little bit more, and you can understand why Wallace might have been so taken with the image McCain was pushing back when Wallace wrote "Up Simba." How much truth there was in that image is debatable, and it's certainly possible that Wallace was "taken in" if McCain and his handlers were, in fact, as cynical back then as they apparently were when, years later, they picked Palin as his running mate.

I'm not going to sit here and claim Wallace was an overtly political writer--I don't think anyone could make that case convincingly--but to disparage the kind of political "debate" that typically goes on in the popular media (which served as a model, I presume, for the columns Wallace refers to) isn't to claim that a debate isn't worth having. It's more like claiming that no debate is actually taking place. Which I agree with.

I think the columns were the kinds of debates that students at a school like Amherst have on politics - not professional writers, lobbyists or politicians, but instead impassioned 18 to 22 year old activists who were in the middle of getting a decent education. He just didn't want it to disturb his dinner, and so is publishing his complaints about a couple of his fellow students and likely friends or at least acquaintences.

On the other hand, if you wanted to look at writing three levels of abstraction into academia, I think he had a keen interest in philosophical discussion apart from the real-life political process. But it is removed. The key is, no where does he participate in the real world debate - not a criticism, but an observation.

He, you and I can debate whether or not a debate is worth having or not - the key is, no where is he a real participant in any such debate, anywhere, save possibly the Rolling Stone article, or some reading of his novels as participation, a reading I suspect he'd rebel against. The way footnotes or commentary and text interacted was simply more interesting to him (and no one plumbs it better than he does - Derrida included) than how Ds and Rs interact, or how people trying to figure out whether to approve a nuclear power plant or bus students interact.

10:
I mean...don't you think the stomach ache comment was a joke, though? It seems like you're treating that as an actual complaint. I really doubt that he seriously meant that he didn't want people arguing in the paper because he wanted to read pleasant things while he ate dinner. It was just a funny way of starting a letter in which he was seriously objecting to the level of debate in the paper. A style of debate inculcated by society at large, I'd add. When Wallace characterizes the columns in question as "shrill," I know exactly what he means (so do you, right? I feel like you're dancing around the issue of American politics being a huge travesty and I'm not sure if it's intentional or not). If the standard of debate in society were higher, the way all those impassioned students articulated their opinions would be more sophisticated too.

It's just weird to me that you're painting the guy as some kind of head-in-the-clouds dreamer, when he was so explicitly concerned with morality and conscientious behavior. Witness: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2007/11/just-asking/6288/

Or the intro he wrote to the edition of Best American Essays he edited.

The key is, no where does he participate in the real world debate - not a criticism, but an observation.

I'm not sure I agree with that. If you look at something like "E Pluribus Unum, I think that Wallace ultimately argues that there is no way to be purely an observer.

Or as someone else said, ""we still inhabit a culture of narcissism. Does Wallace's work represent an unusually trenchant critique of that culture or one of its most florid and exotic symptoms? Of course, there can only be one answer: it's both." :

I don't think either of you is wrong here. He can be compassionate and committed to political principles on a philosophical level (the former certainly, the latter I'm not sure), yet still disengaged from the actual political process and decrying it as a travesty, and that process can be a travesty, yet still the only politics we've got and worth engaging with. Conversations on both the individual and sociopolitical levels are both worth having.

And I'd say a powerful caring for the people around us and desire to engage and make things better, yet a dubiousness or disengagedness from questions of how to make that happen, are pretty much a standard part of the culture of narcissism Jesse refers to. We all want to feel like we're good. Yet we're helpless. That's a very Wallacian dilemma. How do we triumph over our own disaffectation?

Yes. I think irony and reflection and engagement and authenticity are all sort of tar-baby ideas for Wallace. The further you struggle to disengage yourself from the concepts, the more you're stuck to them.

I don't think Wallace was naive about politics. It would be an impossible feat for a man whose intellect could not stop, and who could write in-depths examinations of just about any subject imaginable, could be blind to the entire world of politics. I think he was very political, just because he couldn't write about the human condition and ignore politics. But his politics in Infinite Jest seem to be tied in with his psychological issues, so he has not mentioned (except in passing) the usual dichotomies of American politics, because he wants to say something more essential.

But his politics in Infinite Jest seem to be tied in with his psychological issues, so he has not mentioned (except in passing) the usual dichotomies of American politics,

Then you read something like "Tense Present," and realise that Wallace was all too aware of the political implications of the smallest things. I'm not sure Wallace thought it even possible to be apolitical, even as he struggled to do so.

I read this and wonder at what people want DFW to be? He was a fabulously talented writer and a falliable and troubled person whose troubles very much filled and inspired those books. He is, indeed, incredibly revealing on the psychology of all his characters, and if you find politics in that, it will be deep indeed... but not someone you should look to for insight on the Middle East and not the most compelling or interesting writer on the politics of the one politician he chose to write on. For him, the human and very much the academic dimension were overwhelming.

And, Jesse, reminds me with Tense Present, he was enormously funny. Set the table on a roar.

I think that this passage from "Tense Present" is pretty telling...

Bryan Garner is a genius because the Dictionary of Modern American Usage pretty much resolves the Usage Wars' Crisis of Authority. Garner manages to control the compresence of rhetorical Appeals so cleverly that he appears able to transcend both Usage Wars camps and simply tell the truth, and in a way that does not torpedo his own credibility but actually enhances it. His argumentative strategy is totally brilliant and totally sneaky, and part of both qualities is that it usually doesn't seem like there's even an argument going on at all.

DFW sort of takes it one step further down the rabbit hole... He's a man caught between two mirrors, ultimately not able to distinguish the one from the other, but by admitting as much, he manages to slyly position himself outside of their reflexivity, all the while managing to assure us that the position is impossible.

If that makes any sort of sense.

>18 Jesse_wiedinmyer: "Tense Present" was certainly political, and I liked his sort of culminating insistence that insisting on ability on Standard (Written) American English is an intrinsic part of a progressive political stance if you're a teacher of writing. But it's garbage linguistics, and he engages in some really ugly mischaracterization of opponents in what seems to be a covert attempt to justify prescriptivism not as a fait accompli or an accessibility move, but for its own sake, like the "SNOOT" he is upfront about being. In fact, I remember now encountering this essay before I read Infinite Jest, and it being basically the whole basis (along with the bandanna and perhaps the superficially wacky titles of some of his other works) for my initial and very mistaken reading of Wallace as a smarmy, McSweeneysesque, postmodern-lite hack. I have a bit more sympathy now, and I can see him trying to work out and value things that stem from his early upbringing and find ways to value the youthful priggishness that is beyond his control and redounds perpetually (I admit to being not entirely unfamiliar with that feeling myself). But overall I have to agree substantively with LibraryThing luminary Stephen Dodson's assessment (although a couple of his specific attacks are wrong, and some others are petty in a way that I think he misreads Wallace slightly as justifying with his (Wallace's) own argument. I see Wallace as uncomfortably trying a little too hard to square an inherited SNOOTy prescriptivism with a progressive politics of language, and Dodson as missing the excruciating subtext and just seeing him as a self-appointed authority):

http://www.languagehat.com/archives/000510.php

I was attacking DFW's long Harper's essay on usage in a comment on MeFi today, and the more I thought about it, the madder I got, and I finally couldn't resist letting him have it at length. Wallace's long, long article pretends to be a review of Bryan Garner's Dictionary of Modern American Usage, but that's just the pretext for yet another in the endless series of rants about how proper usage is being forgotten and language is going to hell in a handbasket that probably started in ancient Sumer and will continue until the sun goes supernova.

That's odd, because I read "Tense Present" as being inherently descriptivist in intent.

>24 Jesse_wiedinmyer: really? Certainly by the end he's making a sort of grudging "one dialect is as good is another" argument, but he spends a loooooooong time trying to pretend word games like "the mother of an infant daughter who works nights" (paraphrased) are justification for a prescriptive approach. (He also grossly mischaracterizes descriptive linguistics in ways that make no sense.)

Yes. Really.

>26 Jesse_wiedinmyer: OH.

Although this is a very interesting discussion, I wonder if it proves my point to a degree that while many other of Wallace's works have been mentioned, Infinite Jest itself has been somewhat absent from this discussion.

I've never tried reading IJ, so that's pretty much the only reason it's been absent on my end.

Any particular reason for the all-caps on #27, MM, or was that just a typo.

Most of DFW's fiction leaves me somewhat wanting, so I've not been especially tempted to try one of the larger works.

Don't deprive yourself the revolutionary reading experience of Infinite Jest, Jesse!

>29 Jesse_wiedinmyer: no particular reason, I was just trying to reply to the previous comment in what I took to be the spirit in which it was given. Apologies if I misunderstood:)

Gotcha.

No, was just wondering. I'd always taken DFW's slant on that as I'm hardcore, but...

Kind of the grammar equivalent of Miss Manners' statement that graceful manners include never pointing out anyone else's poor manners with the intent to belittle.

>34 Jesse_wiedinmyer: yeah, I like that.