2.8: The Moralists: Samuel Johnson and David Foster Wallace
Lead scholar-producer: Kirsten Hall Herlin
I: Introduction [0:00-8:36]
Sound: David Foster Wallace, “This Is Water”: “I know that this stuff probably doesn’t sound fun and breezy or grandly inspirational the way a commencement speech is supposed to sound. What it is, as far as I can see, is the capital-T Truth, with a whole lot of rhetorical niceties stripped away. You are, of course, free to think of it whatever you wish. But please don’t just dismiss it as just some finger-wagging Dr. Laura sermon. None of this stuff is really about morality or religion or dogma or big fancy questions of life after death.” (21:06-21:37)
Ryan McDermott: That’s David Foster Wallace, speaking to Kenyon College’s class of 2005. Various versions of the graduation speech have been viewed more than two million times on YouTube. Wallace is considered one of the most important American writers of the twentieth century. Born in 1962, died in 2008, he’s the author of the novel Infinite Jest, as well as several short story and essay collections. But in many ways, he’s most famous for this speech, which he titled “This Is Water.” Here’s D.T. Max, the author of Wallace’s biography.
D.T. Max: Certainly the rest of the world, much of the rest of the world, you know, knows that homily, that graduation speech, you know, often if they know nothing else.
Ryan McDermott: Notice D.T. Max’s word for it: a homily, a sermon. Despite Wallace’s insistence that he’s not talking about morality, it was this speech, ironically, that earned him a reputation as a moralist. Wallace has been called everything from “an old-fashioned moralist” to a “postmodern moralist” to a “moralist for a post-moral age.” Yet, as we can see from this speech, Wallace wouldn’t have been comfortable with any of these labels, even if “moralize” was exactly what he wanted to do. Consider this interview he gave on the Charlie Rose show in 1996.
Sound: David Foster Wallace, Interview with Charlie Rose Delight and fun and all of that stuff is definitely—that’s part of what makes art magical for me, but there’s another part. There’s the part—and, see, I’m afraid I’m going to sound like a puritan or a prig—but there’s this part…that makes you feel full. There’s this part that is redemptive and instructive, where when you read something, it’s not just delight. You go, “My God, that’s me.” You know, “I’ve lived like that, I’ve felt like that. I’m not alone in the world.” (9:45-10:16)
Ryan McDermott: These moments point to the main challenge Wallace faced as a writer throughout his career. On the one hand, we hear Wallace mounting a traditional defense of the moral purpose of art: that art should both delight and instruct. What is a moralist, if not the kind of author Wallace describes: a writer who reassures and guides us through that life which is the common lot of all?
On the other hand, we see Wallace’s fear of appearing priggish, puritanical, finger-wagging. In short, the difficulty Wallace faced was how to preach without being preachy, and how to be moral without moralizing.
But Wallace’s struggle to talk about morality was not his unique burden. In his 1996 review of Joseph Frank’s biography of Dostoevsky, he questioned why so many writers today “look so thematically shallow and lightweight, so morally impoverished” in comparison to nineteenth-century writers like Dostoevsky and Gogol. Is it even possible, given today’s cultural climate of “congenital skepticism,” he asked, to write fiction with the degree of “passion, conviction, and engagement with deep moral issues” that we see in these earlier authors?
Welcome to Genealogies of Modernity. I’m your host, Ryan McDermott. In this episode we explore how this problem, of literature struggling to engage with deep moral issues, was also not unique to Wallace’s era. We can see some of his struggles to talk about morality prefigured in arguably the first great modern moralist, Samuel Johnson, who lived from 1709 to 1784. Here is Johnson biographer Walter Jackson Bate.
Sound: Walter Jackson Bate He’s one of the greatest critics in the whole history of literature. Along with Aristotle and Coleridge probably he’s unequaled: his magnificent work The Lives of the Poets, his famous preface to his great edition of Shakespeare.... He’s also one of the supreme moralists in the history of literature. (12:24-12:39)
[4:05]
Ryan McDermott: Johnson and Wallace both experienced the difficulty of talking about morality following what they saw as a modern breakdown in moral discourse. Both writers also aimed to repair this breakdown: to find new ways to talk about old moral problems.
Some historians and philosophers have characterized this problem Wallace and Johnson faced as one of the hallmarks of modernity. Charles Taylor, for example, wrote about the “fading of moral horizons” as one of the three malaises of the modern world. Alasdair MacIntyre argues, in his landmark work After Virtue, that modern moral discourse is in a grave state of disorder. For centuries, MacIntyre points out, Western moral philosophers going back to Aristotle had understood virtue teleologically. That is, they believed that by understanding objectively what a human being is, you could understand what the true purpose or telos of human life is—and from there, you could understand objectively what is good or moral for a human to do. During the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, however, philosophers like David Hume rejected this teleological notion of virtue. This break with teleology led eventually to the common view in the twentieth century that morality is subjective, a matter of individual choice. And if morality is just a matter of personal preference, like taste in dress, then, as MacIntyre argues, our moral discourse would tend to be fragmented and chaotic. How can you reason or persuade others about something that has no objective reason underlying it?
Johnson and Wallace shared this concern, even though they were separated by two centuries and the Atlantic ocean. Wallace only referred to Johnson explicitly twice in his writings, both times in brief footnotes. But arresting commonalities reveal themselves when we collapse space and time and examine these two modern moralists side by side.
The hope is that this parallel inquiry into the lives of Samuel Johnson and David Foster Wallace will shed new light on the problem of discussing morality in modernity and reveal resources for all of us who, like Wallace and Johnson, aspire not just to be delighted by what we read but also edified.
I find the biographical parallels between Wallace and Johnson striking. Here’s episode producer Kirsten Hall Herlin, a scholar of eighteenth-century literature.
Kirsten Hall Herlin: Both Wallace and Johnson were physically outsized figures, and both wrote outsized works. Johnson’s Dictionary weighed more than twenty pounds, and Wallace’s Infinite Jest ran to over a thousand pages. Both had a terrific sense of humor and a talent for mimicry.
Wallace and Johnson share a history of severe, chronic depression. As a teenager dealing with the first signs of the depression that would torment him until his suicide at age 46, Wallace hung a poster of Kafka in his bedroom with the caption “the disease was life itself.” He might as well have captioned it with Johnson’s evaluation of his own life: “a life radically wretched.”
Ryan McDermott: Here’s Jack Lynch, a Johnson scholar and professor of English at Rutgers, on Johnson’s troubled mind.
Jack Lynch: On the psychological side, he almost certainly had obsessive compulsive disorder. Very likely had Tourette Syndrome. And again, almost certainly either clinical depression or depression and manic behavior of bipolar disorder. Johnson had an older brother, Nathaniel, who just disappears from the record when he was, I think, in his early twenties. There were rumors at the time and there have been rumors to this day that he may have been a suicide.
Ryan McDermott: Even Johnson himself, as Walter Jackson Bate reports, likely struggled with suicidal thoughts in his early twenties. For both writers, writing was a source of consolation in the face of psychic loneliness and despair.
Kirsten Hall Herlin: The more I researched this topic, the more I saw a deeper affinity between these two writers and their parallel journeys as moralists. Ambitious and talented as teenagers, Wallace and Johnson began their literary careers poised for success until personal hardship crushed their dreams of becoming great writers. Out of the crucible of these early adult years emerged the mature writing of their middle years, which were animated with new-found moral conviction and led to their respective reputations as moralists.
II: The Literary World that Shaped David Foster Wallace [8:36-10:57]
Ryan McDermott: To understand Wallace and Johnson as writers, we have to begin by looking at the literary worlds that shaped them. Let’s start with David Foster Wallace.
Kirsten Hall Herlin: It was the American postmodernist writers of the 60s that made literature and writing “click,” to use Wallace’s own word, while he was a student at Amherst College. Here’s Wallace reflecting back in 1997 with Charlie Rose:
Sound: David Foster Wallace, Interview with Charlie Rose The biggest, thing for me about—that was interesting about post-modernism is that it was the first text that was highly self-conscious, self-conscious of itself as text, self-conscious of the writer as persona, self-conscious about the effects that narrative had on readers and the fact that the readers probably knew that.… This was a real beaker of acid in the face of the culture, the culture at the time that this came out. This was before, you know, the youth rebellion in the ‘60s. It was very staid and very conservative… And the problem, though, is, now, is that a lot of the shticks of postmodernism—irony, cynicism, irreverence—are now part of whatever it is that’s enervating in the culture itself? (22:01-22:52)
Kirsten Hall Herlin: As a college student, Wallace had immersed himself deeply in philosophy and theory, and the postmodernists modeled for him how to marry hardcore philosophy and literary fiction. Additionally, those three pillars of postmodernism—irony, cynicism, irreverence—were a natural fit for his personality.
Wallace had his first encounter with literary fame in his early twenties, after publishing The Broom of the System, a novel in which he flexed his newfound postmodern muscles. Then came the follow-up, a short story collection.
Sound: D.T. Max, Conversation with James Wood at Harvard University He goes to the University of Arizona where he writes a really interesting short story collection, and that story collection is called Girl with Curious Hair. And it’s basically an attempt to kind of knock on all the possible doors of postmodernism and try and see which one would be right for David. And in the end he concludes that no postmodernist effort satisfies him. (34:17-34:38)
Ryan McDermott: Wallace would largely reject postmodernism later on. But these were the writers who formed his early imagination and taste: literary rebels who were masters of irony and broke the rules of Western narrative fiction in order to unsettle their reader’s comfortable beliefs and assumptions. These rebels helped Wallace find a voice that catapulted him into early fame.
But even the avant-garde stands on the shoulders of giants.
III: The Literary World that Shaped Samuel Johnson [10:57-17:20]
Kirsten Hall Herlin: Long before the postmodernists, there was another group of writers living in early eighteenth-century London, writers like Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope who in their own way shocked the culture with their brilliant use of irony, satire, and experimentation with literary form. Exposing what was wrong in society and exploding hypocrisy were bread and butter to satirists like Swift and Pope. In particular, these writers set out to expose what they saw as the folly of eighteenth-century intellectual life—while showing off their own wit and erudition at the same time.
Exhibit A is Pope’s The Dunciad, first published in 1728. A parody of classical epics like the Iliad and the Aeneid, The Dunciad mocks all forms of poetic and intellectual stupidity and has at its ironic heroes the poets, booksellers, and publishers who were Pope’s enemies in real life.
Ryan McDermott: It was a belligerent, competitive world where a young writer had to have a sharp wit and a thick skin to get ahead—and it was a world Johnson entered with early success. His first satire, based on classical models, made a stir in this literary world. Pope himself thought it was brilliant.
Kirsten Hall Herlin: Satire was as much a natural fit for the young Johnson as postmodern irony was for the young Wallace. By the 1740s, Johnson was poised to become the next great satirist.
Jack Lynch: He was venturing into satire. It was a very standard way for writers to make their way, but all along there’s, there’s some discomfort with satire in Johnson’s works.
Ryan McDermott: To understand what Jack Lynch means by Johnson’s discomfort with satire, we need to take a step back and look at the status of satire in eighteenth-century culture. Satire was popular, but also always struggling for respectability. And eighteenth-century proponents of satire defended it on moral grounds: when the satirist ridicules someone or something, he is really showing how the object of his satire falls short of the virtuous ideal we should aim for. You aren’t attacking people, you’re attacking vice and defending virtue—and that’s what makes ridicule okay.
Kirsten Hall Herlin: In our conversation, D.T. Max pointed out to me out that, in theory, eighteenth-century satire serves the opposite purpose of postmodern irony: satire is supposedly used to uphold moral values, while postmodern irony says that nothing has greater value than anything else. The eighteenth-century satirist exposes and ridicules vice in order to correct it, whereas the postmodernist uses irony to expose the fact that there is no moral standard. Everything is a sham, there is no truth, and nothing can be taken seriously.
But what satire says it does, the critics said, is different than what it actually does. And what it actually does is not particularly moral.
Jack Lynch: Satirists in general, really do get joy out of a lot of cheap shots out of a lot of things that are purely personal.
Kirsten Hall Herlin: Take, for instance, another of Pope’s satires, “An Epistle to Arbuthnot,” in which Pope takes a shot at his political enemy John Hervey.
Jack Lynch: Pope says, I know it’s a cheap shot and I’m going to make it, and I’m going to make it a great length. And I am going to be extremely clever and bitter, and poor John Hervey is going to be remembered for a quarter millennium solely because I disemboweled him.
Kirsten Hall Herlin: If you strip away the rhetorical niceties about moral intent, what you get is something that looks more like postmodern irony than not. Eighteenth-century satire too often serves to destroy than to correct and edify. And Johnson recognized that.
Jack Lynch: I think he, early in his career, was on the satire train. It was a fashionable thing, it’s a fun genre to write. But I think he realized that despite the protestations, satire is often a really corrosive genre. There was a sense in a lot of his works from mid-career on that... irony and wittiness should be kept away from the really serious truths.
[15:06]
Ryan McDermott: But if you can’t approach the real truths with satire, then how do you go about it?
Kirsten Hall Herlin: Walter Jackson Bate has argued that Johnson took a new approach to satire, which Bate calls satire manqué—French for “satire thwarted.” In satire manqué, Johnson sets up what a reader would recognize as a satiric situation, but then pulls back and transforms it into something else.
Here’s an example from Rasselas, the short philosophical novel Johnson published in 1759. Rasselas, the novel’s hero, attends the lecture of a stoic philosopher who preaches that those who can conquer their passions will transcend suffering and find happiness. Rasselas thinks that this teacher has all the answers. But then he finds the philosopher weeping over the unexpected news of his daughter’s death. Confused, Rasselas asks him, “Have you then forgot the precepts…which you so powerfully enforced?” In the hands of Pope or Swift, we’d be mocking or chastising the philosopher for his hypocrisy—that he fails to practice what he preaches. Not so with Johnson. Instead, he writes at the end of the chapter that Rasselas’s “humanity would not suffer him to insult misery with reproof.” Rather than ridicule the philosopher’s failure, Johnson asks the reader to pity him instead.
So, charity rather than censure—this, I would say, is the cornerstone of Johnson’s moral thought. Here’s Jack Lynch.
Jack Lynch: It’d be very hard to, to come up with a short summary of a guiding principle in Johnson’s moral writing, but one of them is compassion—compassion, where a lot of other moralists would say this person had a shot and behaved badly, we should therefore hold this person in contempt. Johnson was all for maximal compassion, even for people who had screwed up very badly. So he was exceedingly charitable to the poor, even when, by the standards of the day, they were not the deserving poor. He was very kind to prostitutes, to criminals of all sorts.
IV: The Hardships and Struggles that Shaped Johnson and Wallace [17:20-30:15]
Ryan McDermott: So, why embrace this conviction that there are some subjects that satire shouldn’t touch, when his culture, even his very disposition, would have rewarded him for touching them, it seems? Why does he opt for compassion instead? Johnson had everything to gain from writing satire in the style of Pope and Swift, right? So what do you think changed his mind?
Kirsten Hall Herlin: I would argue that it was Johnson’s own early experience of hardship and failure that led him to turn his back on satiric criticism and to embrace his conviction that such criticism was morally corrosive to society. Walter Jackson Bate also holds this view:
Now how did he get there? And why is it that what he tells us is so convincing? I think it’s because everything came to him the hard way. Absolutely everything. (13:08-13:20)
Kirsten Hall Herlin: Bate is not exaggerating: from his earliest years, Johnson’s life was marked by hardship. As an infant, he suffered an infection that left him partially blind, deaf and with permanent scarring to his face. Years later, he was able to attend Oxford, but had to drop out after only a year because his family could no longer afford tuition.
Sound: Walter Jackson Bate He went home in a state of despair and melancholy so acute that it seemed to others that he was losing his mind, and it lasted for about five years. And he would force himself to walk to Birmingham and back, a distance of thirty miles in the muddy roads in order to try to shake himself into sanity. (17:30-17:46)
Kirsten Hall Herlin: Meanwhile, having failed at Oxford, Johnson attempted to start his own school in his hometown of Lichfield. That too was a failure, so instead he went off to London to make his fortune and fame as a writer. He toiled away in obscurity and poverty for the better part of a decade. But all that changed in 1746 when a group of booksellers approached him about writing a dictionary. This work, which eventually secured his fame as one of the intellectual giants of his age, took him nine years to write. In that time, he also wrote a number of other pieces: the poem “The Vanity of Human Wishes,” the Rambler, which is a series of over two hundred essays on various moral subjects, and his novel Rasselas. These are the works that became central to his reputation as a great moralist.
Bate explains the importance of this arc in Johnson’s life, the arc that took him from disabled infant, to Oxford drop-out and failed schoolteacher, to London’s most celebrated author:
Sound: Walter Jackson Bate Step by step, in the hardest possible way, he comes through to the triumph of honesty, to experience that all of us really value. His soul, ... was not different from other people’s, but simply more so, greater. (7:56-8:24)
[20:05]
Kirsten Hall Herlin: So what is this triumph of honesty that made his soul greater than others? I’d suggest it was his courage to reject the pleasures of satire in favor of a richer moral vision, one that did not merely expose the deformities of human nature, but that offered its cure. James Boswell, Johnson’s biographer, once characterized the difference between Johnson and the satirist Jonathan Swift. He said that Swift “mangles human nature. He cuts and slashes, as if he took pleasure in the operation.” In Johnson, on the other hand, “you will see a tender-hearted operator, who probes the wound only to heal it.”
In his review of Joseph Frank’s biography of Dostoevsky, David Foster Wallace wrote, “what seems most important is that Dostoevsky’s near-death experience changed a typically vain and trendy young writer—a very talented writer, true, but still one whose basic concerns were for his own literary glory—into a person who believed deeply in moral/spiritual values.” Wallace is talking about Dostoevsky here, but it’s also, more or less, a neat distillation of the story we’ve just told about Johnson: a talented young writer whose experience of poverty, failure, and insanity transformed him from a trendy and precocious author into an honest and serious one. It’s also the story we can tell about Wallace himself.
Ryan McDermott: We left Wallace in his late twenties, the author of two books who has had his first real taste of fame. But we’ll also remember what D.T. Max said: that in Girl with Curious Hair, Wallace had knocked on all the doors of postmodernism and found them empty. Wallace had hit a creative wall. He sensed that, as entertaining as his postmodernist games were, they were ultimately self-serving and empty.
Kirsten Hall Herlin: During these years, Wallace also began to struggle with substance addiction. Convinced that his career as a writer was over, he decided instead to pursue an academic career, like his father, and was admitted to Harvard’s PhD program in philosophy. After only three weeks, Wallace was hospitalized at McClean, Harvard’s psychiatric institute, and placed on suicide watch. He spent a month in their alcohol rehab and detox center, where his doctors told him if he didn’t break his addiction, he would be dead by the age of thirty. So, having hit rock bottom, his scholarly and literary ambitions in shambles, Wallace moved to a halfway house called Grenada House and began the hard and humbling work of recovery.
Ryan McDermott: Here’s D.T Max reading from his biography of Wallace.
Sound: D.T. Max, Conversation with James Wood at Harvard University He came to understand that the key this time was modesty. He knew it was imperative to abandon the sense of himself as the smartest person in the room… Not that things came easily. The simple aphorisms of the program seemed ridiculous to him, and if he objected to them someone inevitably answered him with another, telling him, for example, “to do what was in front of him to do,” or “to take it one day at a time,” driving him even crazier. He was astonished to find people talk about a higher power without any evidence beyond their wish that there were one. They got down on their knees and said the thankfulness prayer. Wallace tried once at Granada House, but it felt hypocritical. All the same, he liked to quote one of the veteran recovery members, … who told him, “It’s not about whether or not you believe. It’s about getting down and asking.” (44:38-45:49)
Sound: Michael Silverblatt Many people wish that they could still be drinking and/or using, but for him it was really the beginning of a new life that he’d gotten when he came to us as a writer. (9:41-9:59)
Kirsten Hall Herlin: That’s literary critic Michael Silverblatt on the profound impact that recovery from addiction had on Wallace. Wallace’s time in recovery allowed him to see his falling-out with postmodernism and subsequent breakdown not simply as a private creative plight, but as related to a society-wide crisis that had American culture by the throat. Wallace explained what he saw as the dangers of postmodern irony in an interview with NPR in 1997.
Sound: David Foster Wallace, NPR Irony and sarcasm and all that stuff are fantastic for exploding hypocrisy and exposing what’s wrong in extant values. As far as I can see, they’re notably less good at erecting replacement values or coming any closer to the truth. (12:31-12:45)
Kirsten Hall Herlin: His view resonates with Johnson’s own objections to satire as a corrosive genre that doesn’t always offer a cure for the sickness it’s diagnosed. In an interview with Larry McCaffrey for the Review of Contemporary Fiction, Wallace argued that “Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it’d find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it.” Like Johnson, Wallace’s fall from grace opened his eyes to the possibility that the writer should aspire, not just to reveal the darkness of the world, but to hold up a lamp to guide his readers through it.
Ryan McDermott: And Wallace felt that his experience with addiction was an experience that Americans needed guiding through. He’d come to see America itself as a nation of addicts—not necessarily drug addicts or alcohol addicts, but addicts to pleasure and entertainment, to material possessions and wealth, fame and professional success. To Wallace, it seemed the more one had of those things, the more one was left feeling lonely, empty, and dissatisfied. America was the most prosperous nation on earth, yet was no happier for it.
[25:18]
Sound: David Foster Wallace Interview A lot of the impetus for writing Infinite Jest was just the fact that, that I was about thirty and I had a lot of friends who were about thirty, and we’d all, you know, been grotesquely overeducated and privileged our whole lives and had better healthcare and more money than our parents did, and we were all extraordinarily sad. (3:22-3:41)
Kirsten Hall Herlin: The word “addict,” Wallace pointed out, comes from the Latin word that means “devotion” or “worship.” Addiction, then, was a distortion of a religious impulse, and he concluded that we in contemporary America had chosen to worship false gods.
Ryan McDermott: Remember the Kenyon commencement address we heard at the top of the episode? Wallace shared this conclusion explicitly in that speech:
Sound: David Foster Wallace, “This Is Water” Because here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshiping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship—be it JC or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles—is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough.... On one level, we all know this stuff already. It’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness. (17:54-19:07).
Kirsten Hall Herlin: And Wallace is right: this isn’t a new insight. It’s what we read in the wisdom literature of the Bible: “Vanity of vanities…all is vanity,” reads Ecclesiastes. It was also a favorite theme of Johnson in his novel Rasselas and his poem “The Vanity of Human Wishes.” What Wallace did was reframe these old insights for America at the turn of the twentieth century.
Learning the truth was one challenge. But writing about it was even harder. Here’s Wallace in a 1997 interview with NPR, the year after he published his magnum opus, Infinite Jest.
Sound: David Foster Wallace Interview I’m so terrified of sounding like Bill Bennett or, you know, church lady who’s been parodied on Saturday Night Live… that this entire, how to talk straight about anything that really means anything, that might sound cliche, that might sound uncool, might sound unhip. I mean, there’s an absolute terror that goes along with it.... That there is some weird way that if the greatest sin in the past was, you know, obscenity or shock, the greatest sin now is appearing naive or old-fashioned. (9:44-10:22)
Kirsten Hall Herlin: This, right here, is at the heart of what became Wallace’s greatest challenge as a writer. On one hand, the old Wallace embraced the avant-garde, the edgy, and had been trained by television and the postmodernists to mock anything “moral” as retrograde, sentimental, or naive. On the other hand, the new Wallace recognized the hollowness of this hip, ironic stance and felt compelled to do what writers for hundreds of years have accepted as the moral purpose of literature. That purpose was to offer to your readers not just delight but also edification on all the same old problems that have vexed human life since the ancient world: love and desire, pride and ambition, sacrifice and redemption. After all, it was those retrograde, corny moral verities that had saved his life at Grenada House. So, this was Wallace’s challenge: how do you talk about old moral truths in a way that doesn’t sound stale, or banal, or dogmatic, in a way that doesn’t simply repeat what everyone else has said before. How, as a writer, do you breathe new life into old moral truths?
This problem was not unfamiliar to Johnson, though he would have framed it in different terms. If the eighteenth century was the age of satire, it was also the age of originality. For the first time, writers and critics widely began to champion originality as an artistic ideal and denigrate what seemed mere repetition or imitation.
Johnson himself valued literary novelty. He criticized John Milton’s poem “Lycidas” as having “no art” because “there is nothing new” in it. But he also saw that novelty cannot be purchased at the price of truth. As Johnson put it in the preface to Shakespeare, “the pleasures of sudden wonder are soon exhausted, and the mind can only repose on the stability of truth.” Johnson agreed with Wallace that the whole trick is to find a way to present that stable truth in a way that surprises and strikes the reader, so that they feel what they already knew with fresh conviction. And this is exactly what Johnson himself excelled at. Here’s Walter Jackson Bate.
Sound: Walter Jackson Bate He’s always so unpredictable. You can never tell what he’s going to say. “He said,” said a friend, “he said the commonest things in the newest manner.” (30:34-30:46)
V: Final Legacies [30:15-44:15]
Ryan McDermott: Johnson and Wallace shared a similar goal as moral writers: how to write about the “known truths” that we’ve been taught since our childhood in language that does not sound trite or sentimental. Yet, as we assess their legacies as two of the great moralists of their respective ages, we cannot avoid one inescapable difference in their lives, and that is how they ended. Johnson lived out the full length of his life. He died after a long and painful battle with congestive heart failure and chronic bronchitis, among other ailments. Wallace’s life ended differently. Here’s DT Max.
Sound: D.T. Max, Conversation with James Wood at Harvard University David fits a wonderful paradigm, and the paradigm, which is a kind of a paradigm that makes us all sleep well in our beds is: crazy, early experimentation, moves towards eternal verities later in life, recognizes the role of, you know, God and family, you know, ends up baking apple pie. And then there’s this inconvenient ending that we all don't know what to do with. (1:13:19-1:13:37)
Ryan McDermott: Wallace’s life was cut prematurely short when he died by his own hand in 2008. His suicide devastated the literary world, and it left family, friends, and readers looking for a way to reconcile the comforting paradigm with the inconvenient ending. After his death, the internet exploded with blog posts, articles, and videos that tried to come to terms with how a writer whom so many had admired and looked to for guidance could have taken his own life.
Kirsten Hall Herlin: Wallace’s suicide seemed so at odds with his reputation as a moralist. After all, the moralist is concerned with how to live.
Ryan McDermott: One straightforward explanation presented itself: the failure of Wallace’s antidepressant medications.
Sound: D.T. Max, Conversation with James Wood at Harvard University He was on a very difficult to metabolize antidepressant called Nardil, and there were some suggestions that he went off of the Nardil because it was physically so hard for him to be on the Nardil. (1:26:28-1:26:38)
Kirsten Hall Herlin: But a comparison with Johnson’s life suggests that the clinical answer alone may not tell the whole story. Following the respective triumphs of the Dictionary and Infinite Jest, both Johnson and Wallace’s careers entered a new phase, which can only be called mid-life crisis. Competing with their former success and haunted by the possibility of future failure, they both struggled with their next big projects: Johnson with his edition of Shakespeare and The Lives of the Poets, Wallace with his novel The Pale King, which he never finished. For some of Wallace’s followers, there was another story about his death beyond the clinical one, and it was connected to this work. Here’s D.T. Max.
Sound: D.T. Max, Conversation with James Wood at Harvard University Between the New Yorker piece and Every Love Story is a Ghost Story, my belief that David had effectively committed suicide because he couldn’t finish the novel actually got stronger. (1:26:16-1:26:24)
I think, you can’t know, but I think nearly every ounce of his decision to reject the Nardil was connected to his desire to finish The Pale King, and only a tiny part was about—I mean, I think that was the blather that he laid out so people would let him get off one drug and try and get on another, but the question of what he couldn’t finish is such a terrific question. (1:26:40-1:27:02)
Kirsten Hall Herlin: In his biography of Wallace, D.T. Max offers one possible answer to this question of what it was that Wallace couldn’t finish in The Pale King. He suggests that Wallace felt he had failed to solve “[the] problem of how to use an innovative writing style to carry out a conservative fictional purpose.”
But I believe that Johnson actually solved this problem much more successfully than Wallace did. And I think this is partly because he understood a paradox that Wallace didn’t, which is that that literary originality exists not in spite of a conservative purpose but because of it. This, I think, is one way of understanding what Johnson wrote in the preface to Shakespeare: “the pleasures of sudden wonder are soon exhausted, and the mind can only repose on the stability of truth.”
Johnson succeeded in saying the commonest things in the newest manner because he believed in what Wallace called “capital-T Truth.” And he believed this Truth was available to writers and readers. In Johnson’s case, he was faithful to the Christian teachings of the Church of England, even if he sometimes experienced doubt.
Jack Lynch: Johnson was an exceedingly devout Christian. But he was not a simple and unproblematic believer. So for him, faith was a constant discipline. It was an effort to continue to believe in the things he believed in, even as he saw all the good reasons not to.
[34:48]
Ryan McDermott: By contrast, Wallace’s own foundation of truth never quite seems to have stabilized in that kind of way.
Sound: D.T. Max, Conversation with James Wood at Harvard University To me, he emerges…as almost a kind of Thomas Merton-like figure, but with the really interesting difference that he never, he never sort of settles on an orthodoxy. He remains so totally, and sadly, and, I think, wonderfully a humanist, you know, always searching. (1:39:33-1:39:55)
Kirsten Hall Herlin: What Wallace believed has been the subject of intense interest in recent years. D.T. Max shared this with me:
Max: After Every Love Story is a Ghost Story, I think I got more questions from academics about him and religion than I got about anything else by a large margin. And I think it’s because, you know, one feels that there should be a religious impulse to go with a moral impulse.
Kirsten Hall Herlin: The closest it seems he came to resting on a “capital-T Truth” is neatly captured in this moment from his Kenyon commencement speech, which Matt Bucher described as “the purest distillation of his own philosophy.”
Sound: David Foster Wallace, “This Is Water” Not that that mystical stuff’s necessarily true. The only thing that’s capital-T True is that you get to decide how you’re gonna try to see it. This, I submit, is the freedom of real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t. You get to decide what to worship. (17:31-17:53)
Ryan McDermott: Wallace seems to have derived what he says here from his study of the “Big Book” of Alcoholics Anonymous; in that text the founder recounts how turning over his life to a higher power helped him achieve sobriety. But this technique doesn’t require that you really believe a higher power exists.
Matt Bucher: There’s a whole chapter in the Big Book called “We Agnostics.” And it’s sort of like, we’re all agnostics. None of us are really true believers, but let’s just fake it. Let’s just pretend and see if that’ll work. Cuz if you tried everything else, would you be willing to try this?
Kirsten Hall Herlin: This idea of agnostic belief in a higher power may have saved Wallace’s life back in the early ’90s. But it may have provided more of a rescue boat than a final home.
To explain why that particular kind of rescue boat could never be permanent, I’d like to bring us back to MacIntyre. MacIntyre saw a breakdown of moral discourse in modernity. And one important consequence of this was the rise of what he calls “emotivism.” In brief, emotivism reduces the value of something to how you feel about it. For example, when you say a chair is good, you don’t mean that there’s something intrinsically or objectively good about it, like a sturdy, well-functioning design. All you’re saying is, “I approve of it” or “I like it.” Emotivism claims that all value statements that purport to be objective are, in fact, statements of subjective tastes and sentiments.
And if you notice how Wallace speaks about his desire to talk about the values that matter most to human life, he can’t seem to shake the feeling that emotivism is the real story. He worries that his discussion of those values is subjective taste, gooey sentiment—not truth. And if emotivism is the real story, then maybe Wallace was right to feel that his moral assertions always came out sounding like Hallmark cards. Without belief in objective value, sentimental goo is all we’re left with when we try to talk about morality.
So I really do think that Johnson succeeded where Wallace failed and that this perspective helps us understand why. They were both trying to find productive ways of talking about morality in cultures that were inhospitable to that effort. But, as a side-by-side comparison of the two writers shows, Wallace never quite reached the point of Johnson’s understanding – that if you are a modern writer who cares about edifying your readers without alienating them with trite banalities, then you must begin with a stable foundation of truth, or at least with the belief that there is objective truth. Truth is no substitute for style, but style without truth will founder.
Ryan McDermott: So how about you as a reader? What have you learned from reading Wallace and Johnson together?
Kirsten Hall Herlin: In saying that I believe Wallace failed where Johnson succeeded, I want to make it clear that I’m not trying to diminish Wallace’s achievement, or suggest that he’s less worth reading, or even that I enjoy his works any less. It makes me think of an essay Johnson wrote for a periodical called the Adventurer.
He writes, “It has always been the practice of mankind, to judge of actions by the event. … they who attain their wishes, never want celebrators of their wisdom and their virtue; and they that miscarry, are quickly discovered to have been defective not only in mental but in moral qualities…
So Johnson is saying that we tend to evaluate people’s achievements only on the final outcome. But this, as he goes on to say, undervalues their heroic effort. This is certainly true in the case of Wallace, whose efforts shouldn’t be forgotten even if they ultimately ended in failure of a certain sort.
If Wallace failed where Johnson succeeded, it is perhaps because he had more treacherous waters to sail, even if he could navigate with equal skill. The storm clouds that were just starting to gather on the philosophical horizon of Johnson’s London, did not break out into full tempest until the twentieth century. If Wallace failed to complete his life’s great work, it’s only because he had the courage to try when many of us wouldn’t have tried at all.
Johnson also points out that even those who fall short, can still achieve a great deal. He continues in the essay by saying that:
“Those who have attempted much, have seldom failed to perform more than those who never deviate from the common roads of action: many valuable preparations of chymistry are supposed to have risen from unsuccessful inquiries after the grand elixir: it is, therefore, just to encourage those who endeavour to enlarge the power of art, since they often succeed beyond expectation; and when they fail, may sometimes benefit the world even by their miscarriages.”
Wallace may never have found the ultimate truth he was searching for, and his life may have ended in tragedy, but that does not change the fact that his writings transformed many of his readers’ lives for the better.
[40:45]
Matt Bucher: You know, Infinite Jest was great at setting up a lot of these issues of, like, American sadness and loneliness… I do think, you know, for me that it’s been helpful to talk to other people who have gotten something out of it… I could point to some other people who have dealt with drinking problems, people who have, um, maybe just realized how hard it is to be a good person every day… When he was alive, he did write things that I felt people were able to tap into some of the better angels of their nature, and that it made people want to be more empathetic, more generous, and really trying to leap over that wall of self into the other.
Kirsten Hall Herlin: The lives of both Johnson and Wallace underscore the degree to which modern life poses challenges to a moral life, and in Wallace’s case, how much more fraught it is today in our morally pluralistic world. But these writers’ lives also point us to the heart of what it is that ultimately makes them so compelling as moral thinkers—why they can help us navigate the storm of modernity. It’s not their perfect moral lives. More than anything, it is their struggle to live morally and their willingness to share that struggle.
Wallace said in his Kenyon commencement speech that the most important kind of freedom we possess isn’t the freedom to do just whatever we want.
Sound: David Foster Wallace, “This Is Water”: The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad, petty little unsexy ways every day.
Kirsten Hall Herlin: That freedom, he says, can allow us to transform the most hellish and deadening moments into ones that are “not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars.”
But it’s easy to forget we have this freedom. Wallace ended by saying, “It is unimaginably hard … to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out” and remain aware of “what is … real and essential.” Writers like Wallace and Johnson help us stay conscious and aware. They remind us of what we forget. So even if they can’t solve all the moral problems of modernity, they remind us that there are problems we should be attending to. We may have lost a common moral language, but we didn’t lose the need for moral attention or moral action. And without that common moral system, we have even greater need for individual voices who will call us to attention. I think that’s what Wallace and Johnson do. And that, in Johnson’s words, is a “benefit to the world.”
End
