David Foster Wallace: On Art

Church and Wheelchair, Cadaques, Catalunya, 2018

I recently worked my way through David Foster Wallace’s 1,079-page magnum opus, Infinite Jest (no small feat–even with two bookmarks!), as well as his more accessible collection of strange short stories titled Oblivion.

Infinite Jest, especially, is a work of incredible genius. The detail in the text and the extensive footnotes are nigh unbelievable in their darkly humorous intricacy. Then there are the pictures he paints of the often odd worlds of Alcohlics/Narcotics/Overeaters/Whatever Anonymous…of an elite tennis academy for talented and eccentric rich kids…of crazy drug and alcohol use…of a bizarre chess match between a Canadian spy and a USA spy…of a dystoptian American future filled with giant garbage catapults…of a grimy criminal and terrorist underworld…of mass entertainment so compelling it is actually lethal. 

On a more macro level, just opening the book to any random page will put you face-to-face with amazing wordcraft within just about any individual sentence or phrase. (Just like if you open any Hemingway book to any random page you’ll find some reference to alcohol and/or drinking.)

Unfortunately, Wallace took his own life (he hanged himself from a rafter) at the age of 46. Tragic, and a tremendous loss for humanity and the literary world, but also quite understandable when you read through Infinite Jest and see how well he knows the Very Dark Side of: pharmaceuticals, depression, dysfunctional human beans (sic) and their families, 12-step programs of all kinds, ragged folks on the down-and-out, and so on.

Recently, I came across an interesting quote from Wallace that relates directly to all of us as artists. It gets to what the deeper purpose of what art might be (as if we can all agree on that, right?). It also addresses the difference between art that is pretty and meant to hang on the wall above the sofa (and color coordinate with said sofa, naturally), versus art that doesn’t normally sell very well (in fact, directly abhorrent to some) but might have a deeper psychological-emotional-social impact.

Here is the complete quote (with some key word substitutions–“photography” for “fiction” and “viewer” for “reader”, mainly–to make it more pointedly relevant to us photographers who fancy ourselves arteests):

“I had a teacher I liked who used to say good [photography’s] job was to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable. I guess a big part of serious [photography’s] purpose is to give the [viewer], who like all of us is sort of marooned in her own skull, to give her imaginative access to other selves. Since an ineluctable part of being a human self is suffering, part of what we humans come to art for is an experience of suffering, necessarily a vicarious experience, more like a sort of “generalization” of suffering. Does this make sense? We all suffer alone in the real world; true empathy’s impossible. But if a [work of photography] can allow us imaginatively to identify with a character’s pain, we might then also more easily conceive of others identifying with our own. This is nourishing, redemptive; we become less alone inside. It might just be that simple. But now realize that TV and popular film and most kinds of “low” art—which just means art whose primary aim is to make money—is lucrative precisely because it recognizes that audiences prefer 100 percent pleasure to the reality that tends to be 49 percent pleasure and 51 percent pain. Whereas “serious” art, which is not primarily about getting money out of you, is more apt to make you uncomfortable, or to force you to work hard to access its pleasures, the same way that in real life true pleasure is usually a by-product of hard work and discomfort. So it’s hard for an art audience, especially a young one that’s been raised to expect art to be 100 percent pleasurable and to make that pleasure effortless, to [view] and appreciate serious [photography]. That’s not good. The problem isn’t that today’s [viewers are] “dumb,” I don’t think. Just that TV and the commercial-art culture’s trained it to be sort of lazy and childish in its expectations. But it makes trying to engage today’s [viewers] both imaginatively and intellectually unprecedentedly hard.”    –David Foster Wallace, in an interview by Larry McAffery, 1993