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zenithblueI won't cross-post all the beautiful eulogies I've read this week; if you're curious, Nick Mantias over at the Howling Fantods has a pretty complete page set up to keep up with the flood of them.
The one I've liked the most so far is Laura Miller's over at Salon. Miller did one of the better interviews with him post IJ back in 1996, asking what I felt were all the right questions (or at least some of the right questions; it's not a long enough interview to nail him down on all of them). Her eulogy this weekend touched for me on the essence of his work, the essential question of empathy and how difficult it is. She articulates a few things about his work that I've always argued, albeit much more poorly:
Wallace believed, I think, that one way out of [Neal, the suicidal main character of the story Good ol' Neon]'s labyrinthine artificiality, out of his preoccupation with selling "a certain image" of himself to every person he met, was to practice a rigorous, imaginative compassion. If Wallace could persuade himself that he was able to conjure even an inkling of Neal's inner life, then he, at least, might feel a little less alone. By getting it down on paper, he could further subdue that loneliness in other people, as other writers had subdued it in him. This was, in part, literature's purpose, a task to which it was uniquely suited. Perhaps, at times, it also became Wallace's purpose, and kept him alive a little longer as a result. So if we decide that "Good ol' Neon" is primarily about Wallace's own suffering, we betray him. That would amount to insisting that no matter how hard he tried to escape, he remained trapped in himself, concerned only with himself.
...His detractors accused him of being show-offy, of calling attention to his own cleverness, but they, too, were wrong. He meant, with his footnotes and his digressions, to acknowledge the agonies of self-consciousness and the "difference between the size and speed of everything that flashes through you and the tiny inadequate bit of it all you can ever let anyone know."
I have not yet been able to brave McSweeney's, which is currently posting memories from anyone who had contact with him. But I will say it was a comfort to see that Timothy McSweeney is as devastated and as lost as I feel. It really is bizarre psychic territory, to mourn a person I never met but who affected me so profoundly. What do you do to process a grief like that? Hodge thinks I need to write a eulogy myself, though he seems to have an inflated sense of my status as a Wallace fangirl (it does no good to tell him I am one of many; he thinks I might well be the archfan and thus have a responsibility to the internets to write something brilliant). But I'm not sure what I'd say that Miller hasn't said better, and I'm not sure I can eulogize right now anyway. I'm still doing the Kubler-Ross shuffle.
Anyway...thanks for all the patience and concern in the past week, I love you all. I am doing OK. I have mail for a few of you that has been deferred on account of me being a big old mess but hopefully it'll be on its way shortly.
The one I've liked the most so far is Laura Miller's over at Salon. Miller did one of the better interviews with him post IJ back in 1996, asking what I felt were all the right questions (or at least some of the right questions; it's not a long enough interview to nail him down on all of them). Her eulogy this weekend touched for me on the essence of his work, the essential question of empathy and how difficult it is. She articulates a few things about his work that I've always argued, albeit much more poorly:
Wallace believed, I think, that one way out of [Neal, the suicidal main character of the story Good ol' Neon]'s labyrinthine artificiality, out of his preoccupation with selling "a certain image" of himself to every person he met, was to practice a rigorous, imaginative compassion. If Wallace could persuade himself that he was able to conjure even an inkling of Neal's inner life, then he, at least, might feel a little less alone. By getting it down on paper, he could further subdue that loneliness in other people, as other writers had subdued it in him. This was, in part, literature's purpose, a task to which it was uniquely suited. Perhaps, at times, it also became Wallace's purpose, and kept him alive a little longer as a result. So if we decide that "Good ol' Neon" is primarily about Wallace's own suffering, we betray him. That would amount to insisting that no matter how hard he tried to escape, he remained trapped in himself, concerned only with himself.
...His detractors accused him of being show-offy, of calling attention to his own cleverness, but they, too, were wrong. He meant, with his footnotes and his digressions, to acknowledge the agonies of self-consciousness and the "difference between the size and speed of everything that flashes through you and the tiny inadequate bit of it all you can ever let anyone know."
I have not yet been able to brave McSweeney's, which is currently posting memories from anyone who had contact with him. But I will say it was a comfort to see that Timothy McSweeney is as devastated and as lost as I feel. It really is bizarre psychic territory, to mourn a person I never met but who affected me so profoundly. What do you do to process a grief like that? Hodge thinks I need to write a eulogy myself, though he seems to have an inflated sense of my status as a Wallace fangirl (it does no good to tell him I am one of many; he thinks I might well be the archfan and thus have a responsibility to the internets to write something brilliant). But I'm not sure what I'd say that Miller hasn't said better, and I'm not sure I can eulogize right now anyway. I'm still doing the Kubler-Ross shuffle.
Anyway...thanks for all the patience and concern in the past week, I love you all. I am doing OK. I have mail for a few of you that has been deferred on account of me being a big old mess but hopefully it'll be on its way shortly.
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on 2008-09-18 05:52 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2008-09-20 06:05 am (UTC)I have been slowly starting my way back into IJ. That's been very hard.
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on 2008-09-18 07:33 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2008-09-20 06:09 am (UTC)I am there too.
I didn't cry at all until I started re-reading IJ. I got to the first conversation between Mario and Hal and just...bawled. Re-reading that book is really, really hard right now, but I think it's hard in a good way. I feel a little like I'm cauterizing a very messy wound in the process.
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on 2008-09-18 10:13 pm (UTC)I'd had no idea how well-loved he was by so many people, though in retrospect it shouldn't have been a surprise at all. I've been amazed by how much I've been affected by this. I realized this week that no one has ever made me care so much about the written word as he did. What a terrible time to realize that.
I don't know why I decided to comment here. Maybe just because I have a LiveJournal too. Maybe just because I thought it might be nice, or something, to have a total stranger tell you he's aghast and lost and bewildered about this too. Good luck.
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on 2008-09-20 06:13 am (UTC)Are you at all interested in friending? I checked out your journal and you seem neat. I am kind of erratic on lj but I like reading smart literate people when I do get on my friends list.
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on 2008-09-22 07:03 am (UTC)