Ordinary Unhappiness SQUARE ONE First Order Questions in the Humanities Series Editor: PAUL A. KOTTMAN ORDINARY UNHAPPINESS The Therapeutic Fiction of David Foster Wallace Jon Baskin STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS Stanford, California Stanford University Press Stanford, California © 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. An early version of chap. 4 was originally published as “Untrendy Problems: The Pale King’s Philosophical Inspirations,” in Gesturing Toward Reality: David Foster Wallace and Philosophy, ed. Scott Korb and Robert Bulger, ©2014, Bloomsbury. Reprinted with permission. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. This book has been partially underwritten by the Stanford Authors Fund. We are grateful to the Fund for its support of scholarship by first-time authors. For more information, please see www.sup.org/authors/authorsfund/. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Baskin, Jon, 1980– author. Title: Ordinary unhappiness : the therapeutic fiction of David Foster Wallace / Jon Baskin. Other titles: Square one (Series) Description: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2019. | Series: Square one : first-order questions in the humanities | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018048727 | ISBN 9781503608337 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781503609303 (pbk.) | ISBN 9781503609310 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Wallace, David Foster—Fictional works. | American fiction— History and criticism. | Literature—Philosophy. | Philosophy in literature. Classification: LCC PS3573.A425635 Z527 2019 | DDC 813/.54—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018048727 Cover design: Rob Ehle Cover photograph: Rémi Guillot, Wikimedia Commons Typeset by Kevin Barrett Kane in 10/14 Minion Contents Foreword by Paul A. Kottman vii Abbreviations xi Introduction: Habits of Mind 1 1 Narrative Morality On Philosophically Therapeutic Criticism 23 2 Playing Games Infinite Jest as Philosophical Therapy 39 3 So Decide Brief Interviews with Hideous Men as Philosophical Criticism 81 4 Untrendy Problems The Pale King’s Philosophical Inspirations 113 Conclusion: In Heaven and Earth 133 Acknowledgments 139 Notes 141 Bibliography 161 Index 169 This page intentionally left blank Foreword by PAUL A. KOTTMAN Before being introduced to Jon Baskin’s book on David Foster Wal- lace, I had never read a word of Wallace’s work—in spite of being (I learned from Baskin) a member of the readerly demographic most commonly associated with Wallace. That is, I am identifiably white, male, college-educated, and more or less the right age; I even teach literature and philosophy. I learned, too, that Wallace’s association with such demographics has been taken by some critics as a reason to refuse to read him at all. Other reasons for this refusal include Wallace’s personal behavior, especially his treatment of women, his addictions and suicide, sheer human finitude (one only has time to read so many books), and a gen- eral skepticism that Wallace’s work may not be as good as his advertisers would have us believe. Learning these facts did not immediately convince me to read Wal- lace. But the vocal refusal of critics to read Wallace for fear of being duped by marketers put me in mind of what René Girard once called “the Western gullability par excellence”: namely, “the obsession with gullability” itself—the shame at being taken by mere representations. “When in doubt,” writes Girard, “experts always choose disbelief; this is what makes them experts.”1 Girard was referring to raging, jealous, skeptical Leontes in Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale. But, of course, such raging skepticism has no demographic limits. viii Foreword Meanwhile, the refusal to judge Wallace’s work because of Wallace himself put me in mind of Theodor Adorno’s refusal of jazz—his con- clusion that jazz is unfree (“standardizing”) because it springs from a fundamentally slavish “psychological” “structure”—“the domesticated body in bondage.”2 I make this analogy not to suggest an equivalence be- tween Wallace and black slaves but to make the point that such criticism does not rest on a judgment about the work itself. Instead, it collapses the space between maker and product—the space of culture. This is to say it expresses not a critical judgment but a prejudice. Interest in Wallace’s work continues to rise. Perhaps this is just a trend, the result of effective marketing. But Baskin sets such worries aside. He is not interested in investigating various causes for our inter- est in an author’s work; and he asks us to shelve the issue of whether or not readers personally identify with features of Wallace’s life or work. Whether or how to read Wallace is not, finally, a question about “Wal- lace,” Baskin suggests; it is a question about us. More to the point, Baskin suggests that Wallace’s work knows this—that it invites us to bring the world of which Wallace writes to a fuller awareness and knowledge of itself. With Robert Pippin and Stanley Cavell as his companions, Baskin shows how this kind of self-knowledge is both psychological and sociohistorically indexed. He draws our attention to the way that Wallace’s fiction is itself a world—one that challenges the reader to face it without asking whether it is true or actual or moral but what it could mean to see that it is true and actual, and with what moral implications. Baskin calls Wallace’s fiction “therapeutic,” and although Kant is not discussed in these pages, I was continually put in mind of Kant’s view that there are things that we cannot know, scientifically, but that we also cannot doubt. For example, I cannot “know” that you are in pain—I cannot know the “pain itself” (whatever that may mean)—but I am missing something crucial if I doubt you when you tell me that you are hurting. There are moral (and aesthetic) domains, in which our relationship to things we need to understand are not knowledge-based relations but rather meaning-based relations, so to speak. Moreover, an important step in the direction of addressing moral-aesthetic claims is made when we see that our reliance on certain ways of thinking, certain forms of knowing, can impede this step. Because Baskin convinced Foreword ix me that Wallace understood this, and that his fiction shows us the pervasiveness of a damaging reliance on certain forms of thinking, he convinced me to devote attention to reading Wallace’s work. Baskin asks what the value of his kind of literary criticism is—what good it is. And he offers a number of thoughtful responses to this first- order question. But one answer must be that his critical judgment might bring new readers to Wallace and thereby bring Wallace into the orbit of broadly shared concerns—deepening and refining our understanding not of Wallace but of those concerns themselves.