Sian Williams
Figure 1: Meme depicting the urge for a girly online subjectivity to love a philosophical figure (@esotericgirldump)
I’m really into David Foster Wallace. He’s an essayist and fiction writer who died in 2008, famed for his maximalist, stylised language: page-long sentences, clauses contorted with semi-colons, footnote tangents in his chatty Midwest US vernacular. This self-consciousness forces the reader to pay attention to how the text is made, reminding them there’s a subjective consciousness who created it rather than taking for granted that any writing neutrally or truthfully represents an objective reality.
But DFW feared that hyper-awareness of language can turn inward, causing aloneness in your own interiority. This awareness feeds our infantile fantasy of our own centrality, making us blind toward what it is like to be someone else. As a girl who spends hours absorbing the endless language of social media discourse, while cocooned in the solitude of her duvet inside a bedroom full of consumer items carefully curated to signify her personality, I relate.
One way to get trapped within the self is though self-scrutinising therapeutic language. In some of the short stories from his collection Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, various men confess to misogyny, superiority, sadism— ways of understanding oneself as the only real, knowable subject. Other people, who cannot be as sentient as ‘I’, are demoted into Otherness. One Hideous Man, who controls his sexual partners, psychoanalyses his conquests’ body language as well as his own power ‘complexes’ in ways so cerebrally self-aware it’s creepy. His specialised jargon detaches him from human relations. In another story, The Depressed Person, the protagonist relays her suffocating, self-absorbed agony through therapy-speak buzzwords. When a member of her ‘Support System’ of friends becomes terminally ill, the depressed person only worries about the grief and loneliness her friend’s death will cause her personally. She wishes, like a baby, for someone else to sympathise with her without having to reciprocate care for this Other. With horror, the depressed girl realises that she feels nothing for anyone but herself.
Another way we burrow deeper into singularity according to DFW is through television, which convinces us to buy commodities so we stand out from the crowd, as well as to value our watchable-ness— how much we resemble TV characters— over other qualities about ourselves. There’s a paradox in this way adverts promise to distinguish us from the very masses they address. So to deflect mockery of this hypocrisy, TV evolved into making fun of itself. Its self-ridicule flatters viewers as sophisticatedly knowing and cynically self-aware of their own manipulation. But viewers’ criticisms of TV are ineffectual so long as we emulate its defensive sneering. DFW similarly disliked trendily satirical fiction which critiques US culture by deriding the soullessness of consumerism, since the writer centres their wittiness over connecting with the reader. Since ironists speak insincerely in fear of appearing naïve, they can’t communicate anything substantial.
So having all the words to describe our painful feelings, or our oppression, doesn’t ease either burden. But instead of isolating us, DFW wondered, can language connect us?
For language to even be possible it is a function of relationships. DFW urged his reader to turn awareness, rather than inward, out towards communality. He thought fiction’s value is using language to help readers cross borders and identify with others. Unlike the jaded fiction he disliked, his own stories interrogate less nihilistic possibilities: how can people still love and connect within our narcotic, market-driven contemporary reality? He thought that purposeful critique of our consumerist culture would risk ironists’ eye-rolling: it might seem sentimental; embarrassingly heartfelt; cringe.
Despite the empathy DFW preached, like his Hideous Men he struggled to escape his ego. His intellectual hyper-reflexivity inflated his self-preoccupation. His huge novel Infinite Jest is crammed with encyclopaedic use of chemistry, philosophy and author-invented terms, as well as mathematically structured timelines which confused even its writer, as if he was showing off to a crush. He holds you hostage in hyper-focus on his words, training you to process your reality through his language. And he succeeded in impressing, capturing an infamously hardcore fanbase of bookish bros who sermonize about their hero’s linguistic stunts.
But something about DFW’s self-worship is compelling to me. Empathy—which he preached but didn’t enact— is not naughty or thrilling. What does rouse me is empathy’s opposite: barriers in communication; tension-building borders; unequal power. Desire is what you can’t have— like how Edward’s blood lust for Bella threatens their romance in the YA vampire novels I used to devour. I want to be Bella: someone’s prey. Every woman adores a fascist, Sylvia Plath wrote self-beratingly, and Hideous Man is just another word for fascist: ‘You chilly cunt. You dyke, you bitch, cooze, cunt, slut, gash,’ one story’s Hideous Man says. Like this protagonist, Infinite Jest’s author practically violates the reader. He controls our understanding of every textual detail to the point of perversion. The daddy of disciplining us to deconstruct the physical act of reading.
As I lay reading my Infinite Jest hardback in bed one afternoon, I liked how its pompous size implied the writer’s egotism. My mind strayed libidinously from its convoluted sentences, and I imagined DFW laying there next to me.
He looked around at my setup: my pill bottle, a copy of The Bell Jar, and me in my vintage silk nightdress. I sucked in my stomach.
“It seems like, over valuing meaning, you only want to seem a certain way,” he observed, having taken in this cinematic scene of affected melancholy. I hoped he thought this way I ‘seemed’ was esoteric.
“Like, you aspire to be an on-screen character,” he went on.
“Well duh, obviously,” I said. “I’m just a cog in a machine that turns my viewing of photos of girls I wanna emulate into ad revenue for Meta.’
“This scorn you have for companies’ individualism makes you feel okay about how you yourself act only for your individual gratification,” said David. “Hell, I find your ridicule tiresome.”
“Being tiresome is part of the vibe,” I protested. “You don’t get it. It’s what hot girls do in their off-putting, unsettling eras.”
“By sardonically vibing with your own solipsism, you’re evading criticism for being self-preoccupied,” he said.
‘True,’ I said. ‘I do think about myself loads. About deepening my lore. And about how this is my hysterical, abnormal girl summer.”
“You’re trying to tell me about your sadness by calling yourself hysterical, but this psyche talk only digs you further into your alienated solitude,” David said.
Maybe he was right. I regularly reposted Instagram accounts ran by other unhappy-sounding girls— a textpost open on my phone browser right now said ‘no rizz just fear of abandonment’. Yet I didn’t feel much communal solace from this way of communicating. Instead, we competed to prove, through increasingly neurotic contortions of language, which of us was the most lobotomy-core, terminally online, delusion-pilled princess. Who had bed-rotted the longest and most corrosively. My fluency in pathology-hybrid slang was, rather than way to identify with others, an attachment to my own meme-able personhood.
“But even if I stop joking that I’m ‘unhinged’ online,” I asked, “Do you actually think anyone can abandon their need to be separate from others? Like, I wanna be enviable and seductive. I want to be soo special that a great thinker like you would choose me over any other girl. Love meeeeee.”
But as I spoke, David had dissipated into thin air like the fantasy he was.
I suddenly got really embarrassed for talking to David in my head like he was actually there, like a teenager who humps their anime body pillow and pretends it wants them back. You should unplug yourself from your screens and try getting out more, you might be thinking after hearing this account of my insular afternoon. You would be right, in the sense that my fandom for David might express a wish for a rupture in the borders between myself and others. A longing to disarm myself of my anaesthetising shield of meme-ified sarcasm. To lose self-possession.
Reference List:
‘Brief Interviews With Hideous Men: The Difficult Gifts Of David Foster Wallace’ by Zadie Smith
‘E Unibus Pluram’ by David Foster Wallace
‘Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young’ by David Foster Wallace