David Foster Wallace’s Balancing Books: Fictions of Value
Jeffrey Severs
Columbia University Press, pp. 328, $37.00
By Edmund Waldstein
David Foster Wallace is a novelist whose work calls for scholarly
analysis. But formal studies of Wallace are not written only for academics.
Wallace has a passionate following of readers on an endless quest for a deeper
understanding of his work, who are quite willing to read academic monographs.
In his short story “Death is Not the End,” Wallace wrote mockingly of a poet
“two separate American generations have hailed as the voice of their
generation.” To many of his readers, those words could be applied to Wallace
himself. In his “voice” they find the human predicament as it is lived in the
concrete circumstances of their own time. Hilaire Belloc’s famous observations
about the proverb-maker whose wisdom “catches the mind as brambles do our
clothes,” and who is “perpetually letting the cat out of the bag . . . disturbing
us with our own memory, indecently revealing corners of the soul,” could have
been written as a description of Wallace. At his best, Wallace had an uncanny
knack of capturing the way the “Iago-like voice of the self” (to use one of his
own expressions) sounds to oneself. As A.O. Scott put it, Wallace’s voice is
“the voice in your own head.”
Or at least, it seems that way to Wallace’s fans.
Cartoonists assure us that when chameleons enter the company of
twenty-something men of the pretentious-college demographic, they immediately
develop opinions on Wallace. It is easy to dismiss Wallace’s work as the
Platonic form of “Stuff White People Like,” the self-pity of a privileged
haut-bourgeois liberal, who didn’t understand how good he had things. His fans,
ostensibly empathetic, liberal, and intelligent, are self-centered,
narcissistic, even misogynistic.
I am on the fans’ side. And, thankfully, the best of the
growing field of academic literature on Wallace is quite helpful in opening up
Wallace’s work in ways that show why it is worth taking seriously. Jeffrey
Severs’s Balancing Books:
Fictions of Value is a case in point. Before Severs, “Wallace studies” had
focused largely on the rhetoric of Wallace’s “voice” itself. Wallace was a
master of the rhetorical techniques of literary postmodernism. But he
mistrusted the universal solvent that such irony had become. He thought that
postmodernism had brought a transition from art as “creative instantiation of
real values” to “creative rejection of bogus values.” Rejecting the bogus
values of a corrupt, materialistic culture was all very well, he thought, but
it wasn’t enough. Literature ought to explore how it might be possible to
recover “joy, charity, genuine connections… stuff that doesn’t have a price.”
Scholars such as Marshall Boswell, Allard den Dulk, Adam Kelly, and others have
analyzed Wallace’s attempts at finding a voice beyond endless irony capable of
sincerely raising such questions. Severs’s book, however, shifts the emphasis
toward Wallace exploration of “value.”
Wallace was a great lover of words and etymologies. And
Severs is adept at showing how Wallace plays with and literalizes etymology in
his works. Wallace once made a note of the etymology of “axiology,” the study
of values. It derives of course from the Greek axios, worthy, which in turn derives
from axis, weight. Severs shows how Wallace plays with the notions of weight,
balance, ground, and cost to uncover the absence of value in much of
contemporary life. His characters are always in danger of losing the ground
beneath their feet and floating off into the weightless detachment of
postmodern irony. Such irony exposes the problems with a capitalist culture in
which value is seen as determined entirely by subjective evaluation, and which
therefore lacks any access to the intrinsic worth and weightiness of things.
Severs shows how the crashes of the American economy provide a key background
to much of his work—puncturing again and again the illusory inflation of bogus
value. But again: ironic mockery of the problem cannot lead to any real
solution.
Wallace describes the world of weightless value as
profoundly lonely. In Infinite Jest, Wallace shows a double-bind in that loneliness. Attempts to flee the
loneliness of liberal individualism end up in slavery to addiction or to a
totalitarian cause, such as that of the A.F.R., the terrorist organization that
drives the plot of the novel. The solution to which Wallace tries to point is
one that requires finding “genuine connections” to others, grounded on
something more firm than mere evaluation, but less absorbing than totalitarian
dictatorship. Severs shows how the term “commonwealth” becomes central to
Wallace’s search for that solution. Commonwealth is “unhoardable” good that can
only be had in sharing with others. For Wallace, a paradigm of such
commonwealth was language, which depends on its being shared for its very
existence.
The political working out of the principle of
commonwealth in Wallace’s work remains highly ambivalent and sketchy. Wallace
was determined never to dismiss “hard truths” and “other sides” “in the service
of an argument.” This adds to the fascination of his work, but it also makes
his attempts at pointing towards solutions to the problems that he raises
frustrating. Thus, despite Wallace’s withering critique of liberal culture,
Severs makes a good case for reading his last novel The Pale King as pointing to a kind
of New Deal liberalism as the best hope for an instantiation of the principle
of commonwealth, in which individuals can see themselves as part of a greater
whole, without being absorbed into it. Wallace even had a sort of grudging and
ambivalent admiration for the Protestant work ethic, which laid the foundations
of the very capitalist culture that he also wanted to escape. To a Catholic
integralist like myself, this conclusion seems completely inadequate.
Severs makes suggestive comparisons between Wallace and
Martin Heidegger, whose own explorations of the etymologies of value may have
served as a model to Wallace. But it seems to me that an even more fruitful
comparison would be to Blaise Pascal. Wallace is often said to be describing a
“postmodern” world, but I think that Wallace’s world is better thought of as
“hypermodern” (to borrow Gilles Lipovetsky’s term). The same double-bind
between Cartesian rationalism and Montaigne’s skepticism described by Pascal,
reappears in the double-bind between postmodern skepticism and scientistic
rationalism in Wallace’s even more thoroughly Cartesianized world. Pascal’s
diagnosis of the flight from the lonely misery of the mortal human condition
into the diversions that allow us to forget it, is the same as the “terror of
silence with nothing diverting to do,” described by Wallace. “I can’t think,”
one of his characters says, “anyone really believes that today’s so-called
‘information society’ is just about information.”
Like Pascal, Wallace sees one of the roots of the
problem in the nature of modern scientific-abstraction. The main focus of
Pascal’s scientific work was the disproving of theory of horror vacui as an explanation for
the phenomena which he was to show as being caused by the weight of the air.
And Pascal’s polemic against anthropomorphism in physics in such works as On the Equilibrium of Liquids and On the Weight of the
Air, contributed to forming the very picture of the empty
world from which he draws back in horror in the Pensées. The idea of horror vacui, on which he pours
such scorn, is a striking image for the flight into diversion, the flight from
the vacuum at the heart of the self.
I read Pascal’s On the Equilibrium of Liquids in college in an
early modern English translation, and at the time I’m afraid I was most struck
by the indecent look that the early modern long s (ſ) gave to Pascal’s talk
about ſucking on pipes of mercury—puerile comedy of the sort that would have
appealed to Wallace. But looking at it again recently, I was struck by more
real connections to Wallace. Wallace too was both fascinated and repelled by
the kind of abstraction that he found in modern mathematics, science and
analytical philosophy. He saw it as a root of “the desacralized &
paradoxical solipsism . . . that worships only the Transparent I . . . in an
Information Age where received image & enforced eros replace active
countenance or sacral mystery as ends, value, meaning.” The term “worship” here
is one that appears in many key passages of Wallace’s work. It hints at an idea
in Wallace that a true escape from the double-binds of hypermodernity would
have to be found in something “sacred,” something which he once called “the
sub-surface unity of all things.” Pascal had a much more determinate account of
the transcendence of that “true good” which “all can possess at once, without
diminution.” In Wallace it often seems that the “sacred” is a merely immanent
unity. But the way in which his deep attention to our hypermodern life leads
Wallace towards the sacred in the first place is what give’s Wallace’s work
such absorbing interest.
Pater Edmund Waldstein is a monk of Stift
Heiligenkreuz.
