From Being Constructed to Construing a Corpus: A Brief Reflection on David Foster Wallace as Mythic Destroyer

At the DFW reading celebrating the publication of The Pale King at Babbitt's Books in Normal, Illinois on Friday night, I really understood the heaviness of his loss for the first time. Since he spent nearly a decade teaching at Illinois State University and is from Central Illinois, there is a devotion to him in these parts among former students and colleagues and friends that is both cult-ish and disembodied. He literally haunts these people more than he haunts this place. I can feel through their warm, clammy despair, even almost three years after his loss, the pressure of the longing that brushing with his genius (and I am not one to bandy about that term) created between these people and DFW.

DFW's disembodied presence reminds me of the figure Hard Rock in the Etheridge Knight poem "Hard Rock Returns to Prison from the Hospital for the Criminal Insane." Hard Rock was the baddest badass in prison, bearing the other black inmates up in a racist system, but after he is lobotomized, he is deprived of that swagger: "He had been our Destroyer, the doer of things / We dreamed of doing but could not bring ourselves to do." The poem makes me feel the irremediable heaviness of Hard Rock's loss, as his role simply cannot be filled by another. Even though Hard Rock is still alive, he is not his old self, and the density of the emptiness is so deep as to seem a singularity, an event from which no escape may be found.

Like Hard Rock, DFW was the baddest badass in the pomo-fiction game but at what cost? The Pale King, as a textual body, now lurks like the lobotomized Hard Rock, zapped of the embodied possibility that the mythologically stylized DFW represented with his now-vanished, unfinished genius stuffed into a rich but excessively unfinished corpus.

Even in his absence, the pressure of the loss of his genius is enormous and palpable, warping the way those left behind view the world, like straying too close to a black hole. People need(ed) that genius (our addiction to the product of his addiction and depression), and it was taken away (place blame where you must). Those who were close to him either grieve by unfailingly immortalizing his memory or parasitically crawl inside the corpus to feed (see Jonathan Franzen's careerist, self-absorbed, post-Oprah's Book Club turn for an example of the latter, critiquing DFW's self-absorption and careerism in a twisted version of "anything you can do I can do better" here (warning, you have to Like The New Yorker on Facebook to (I feel so dirty) read it) ).

DFW's corpus is a record of the fear of being constructed, created, made to exist, in any capacity, for any duration. If you are something to someone, anyone, even an anonymous anyone anywhere, or worse, everything to someone, and/or worse still, enlightened enough to make this realization and feel that pressure, which on any level is immense when it is dwelt within, even for nanoseconds, what can be done to alleviate it? And how life-numbingly guilty you must feel to exist at all, when your existence is brought so far to the fore, so close to the brim of the self, so chokingly all-encompassing it is to be needed like that and understand an iota of that need. That kind of guilt can only be compounded by the knowledge that it is self-created, constructed from one's own interest(s) (writing and thinking) and the burning need to do what makes humans human, act on the burningest of self-interested needs, which is the only thing that hints at joy beyond the materialities of existence and beyond the hollowness that is false sacrifice in service to an unpopulated, distorting, and vast exterior nothingness.