Poor David
On David Foster Wallace's Losing Battle with Postmodernity
First off, I love postmodernity.*
*Definition: an era**
**which we may still be in; I am agnostic on the question of whether postmodernity is still the dominant paradigm of American life in 2025. I’ll leave this to the philosophers.
*in which many—most?—Americans shifted from viewing things as things, and began to see most things as representations of things. And while I am not a historian**
**although, in fact, I am.
*I would argue that we hit peak postmodernity in the 1980s and 1990s. Between 1980 and 2000, I spent the first sixteen years of my life in the rapture of this postmodern excess. I reveled in it. I loved the ironic, self-referential, and intertextual aspects of television—advertisements and otherwise**
**something DFW bemoans in his essay “E Unibus Plurum: Television and U.S. Fiction.”
*and I actually loved (and still love) postmodern architecture, if, perhaps, simply in that these are the spaces of my dear childhood, and now looking back I feel nostalgic for that world that we were building—a world of make-believe. It was the only world I knew.**
**Okay. So, for example, here are some of the postmodern architectural traits that I love:
I love the use of big blocks of stone. When postmodern architects brought back Classical-ish columns adorning the front of buildings, they did so with gray and pinkish sparkly stone. As I google this fact of 1990s-era architecture, I want to say that some of it was really marble, but in fact I think a lot of it was granite. Anyway, as a kid I found it opulent, even if today some find it tacky.***
***And yes, there is no question that this is the architecture of Trumpism, and as such historians are going to look back and associate it with American fascism. But in my dear late-20th-century childhood, it was playful and ironic, not yet fascist.
**Okay,
I also love atriums with big-ass plants and water fountains inside. I do. I found these spaces magical as a child. That we might reconstruct a humid outdoor plaza inside a frigid New York skyscraper. Yes, I had been to botanical gardens, but these were office buildings and hotels. Every building a botanical garden / plaza / privatized space that mimicked outdoor public space.***
***Note: I do not love the privatized nature of these spaces. More on that later.
**
And, yes, I loved shopping malls. Glitzy escalators and glass elevators taking shoppers up and down and around an indoor city, resplendent with its own ‘town square,’ some even with old fin-de-siecle-reminiscent fake-gas lamps. As a postmodern kid, I loved the fake-ness of it all, because it was a land of make-believe and the line between real and fake was slippery for us then. I liked that slipperiness.***
***As an adult—as a historian, yes—I have read all the critiques of late 20th century postmodern architecture. In my book Living Queer History I critique the rise of the ‘festival marketplace’ in the 1970s, which sought to transform real, old spaces into newly-revised representations of old places, representations of history, in order to effectively ‘sell place.’ And I am super critical of the loss of third spaces. The private spaces of postmodernity that mimicked public spaces were, crucially, highly policed fantasy lands, and as a white, middle-class kid (who was not yet gender non-conforming or a state-recognized threat to the civil order) I felt a sense of belonging in these fantasy lands. I never went on a luxury cruise in the 1990s like DFW did, but by God did I read those glossy magazines and slurp up those juicy television commercials about luxury cruises. I felt a sense of belonging in that fantasy.
**but enough about postmodern architecture. Let’s return to DFW.
*Hopefully this brief definition of postmodernity has made at least enough sense for the essay to proceed to making its actual point.
David Foster Wallace detested postmodernity. He thought that something was wrong with our society that had turned away from sincerity and toward irony, that had handed in our precious Reality Card™ for a one-way ticket to the world of endless irony, cross-references, reflexivity, of avatars and simulacra!
In reading DFW’s OG essay collection, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, I started to feel bad for David by the time I got to the second essay in this collection, the one about TV. The man rages against the machine of early 1990s-era television*
*that beloved television of my postmodern childhood, sitting cross-legged way up, too close in front of the screen, my mother calling out from the kitchen: “move back!” An order for me to scoot my backside butt-backwards at least a few feet. I am surprised she never drew a scrimmage line in duct tape along the carpet of the downstairs “TV room” (or “the den,” as we called it) behind which I must sit for “TV privileges.”
I started feeling bad for DFW because I knew, reading backwards from 2025, that he was fighting a losing battle. You think early 1990s-era television is too ironic, too parodic, too self-referential? My friend, just wait until something drops in 1994 called Netscape Navigator and you start to surf the World Wide Web.*
*In fact, I found it curious, in an essay collection that included material written as late as 1996 that DFW never once mentioned the Internet, as he surely got “online” in the period between the public launch of the first web browsers in 1994 and the publication of his essay collection two years later. Maybe I need to read further in the DFW oeuvre to get his real thoughts on the Internet.
If DFW detested the irony of early 1990s-era television, just imagine how he would feel about the meme-ificiation of well, everything in the 2010s, and into the 2020s. This is one of those rare, awkward moments in which I am, I suppose, glad that DFW didn’t live to see the day.*
*If you don’t know, it’s important to note that DFW committed suicide in 2008 at the age of 46. He suffered from life-long depression, and experienced several stints of hospitalization. He was a deeply troubled man.**
**I relate only marginally to DFW’s experiences. I am 42 years old, which scares me, because I am close to the same age that he was when he called it quits. And eighteen months ago, I experienced passive suicidal ideation for the first time in my life since I was a (postmodern) teenager. It was one of the most frightening summers of my life—just two summers ago. I finally got on psychiatric medications (for the first time ever) and those pills, plus PTSD-focused talk therapy, have helped me pull back from the brink. Today I am doing really much better!
*I don’t imagine it was his disavowal of an entire postmodern way of life in Modern America that made DFW so unhappy. But perhaps postmodernism played some small part.
But what I really want to write about, to explain DFW’s losing battle with postmodernity, is his 1996 Harper’s Magazine essay “Shipping Out.”
I can say two very true and sincere (completely un-ironic) things about “Shipping Out”:
1) this essay made me laugh out loud (like, literally, not as in “LOL”) for hours. I savored each page. I cackled in my backyard, laying in the hammock, reading, such that my neighbors probably wondered what new wild animal was caught in my fence walls this week, having previously caught a skunk within my yard’s four walls that sprayed my dog in the face and made the entire block smell like we were in a Pepe Le Pew cartoon. (Too postmodern?)
2) this essay made me feel even more sad for DFW.
I felt really sad for DFW because he was just so mean to, and mean in writing about, the other two-thousand passengers on the week-long cruise.*
*Last night, I Google’d “Did anyone ever get really angry at DFW after reading one of his essays in which he said such awful things about them?” and while I wasn’t able to find much, I did find some references to the fact that tennis pro Michael Joyce was apparently not too pleased with DFW’s essay about him, and that, while we don’t know how she actually felt, but that the woman DFW met on the cruise line who he wrote looked like “Jackie Gleason in drag” stopped sending him sweet letters after his essay came out in Harper’s and after she had previously been corresponding with him, sweetly, via mail (not yet e-mail).
And one of his particular targets in that essay was someone he called “Captain Video” because this guy spent the entire vacation on the cruise line taking camcorder videos of everything. “Captain Video,” of course, represents the ultimate postmodern character: instead of actually experiencing the cruise, he is more invested in producing a simulacrum of the cruise via transference of reality onto the television screen.*
*Again, oh, if only DFW could have seen what we’d be doing today in 2025 as we live not real lives but rather digital lives through digital avatars of ourselves on apps that we access via little hand-held devices that we carry around everywhere with us. We might as well just be thousands of brains in a big field gymnasium each one hooked up to a virtual body somewhere in the metaverse. What we think is ‘our lives’ is actually just this play-acting of life, a play-acting of reality.
The problem with DFW’s dismissal of the life choices of “Captain Video” is that DFW himself is doing the exact same thing. Instead of enjoying the cruise, he is spending his entire trip documenting experiences for reproduction in a non-real/hyper-real space: by which I mean the pages of Harper’s Magazine. Yes, he is imagining everyone on the cruise not as real, flesh-and-blood human beings to interact with, but as characters in some kind of grand, seven-day performance art piece. He is critical of everyone else’s postmodern choices except his own.*
*Wait. But if treating the world’s people and places as material for reproduction in the settings and characters of a book is inherently postmodern, then isn’t the act of writing an essay or story in and of itself, regardless of temporality**
**That is, outside of the strict periodization of postmodernity as a late-20th-century phenomenon.
*postmodern?**
**Maybe. Maybe so. Again, I’ll leave this to the philosophers.
*
In conclusion, I believe that DFW, competitive champ that he was (not just in tennis, but in basically any sport he applied himself to in any of his essays), chose a losing battle in this fight against postmodernity. If he wanted to offer an alternative to irony, he could have just enjoyed the cruise trip rather than mocking it. He could have enjoyed the Illinois State Fair rather than trying to read too deeply into it. He probably could have ditched all those damn footnotes, as meta-textual as they were, so postmodern in their commentary upon the commentary. Maybe he could have taken into account his own misogynistic views, wrestled with them, laid them out and examined them, rather than turn each one into a quip, if he really cared about so-called sincerity.*
*During the #MeToo movement of the late 2010s, after DFW’s death, at least one former girlfriend accused him of abuse, which unfortunately isn’t surprising given the amount of overt sexualization of unsuspecting women you can find in his essays, including lots of high-school girls and college-aged young women, which frankly reads as extremely creepy today (if not also back then).**
**Although DFW was a sort of equal-opportunity offender, remarking almost just as often on the looks of young men in his stories. I think that what DFW was trying to do was to convey what he viewed as the superficiality (and objectification) of young people in the po-mo nineties. He saw that young people were extremely influenced by the relentless advertisements on TV telling them how to look and how to behave. Maybe he wasn’t just a creep commenting on teenage girls’ skimpy outfits. I think he also resented how attractive people used their looks as a form of power over nerdy types like himself.
*And all I’ll add to that is that it is possible to simultaneously feel bad for someone for all their suffering, while also steadfastly refusing to excuse their harm. This is the position I take on DFW’s sadness, his meanness, his violence.
Yes, if only DFW had been more sincere himself.
But, to be sure, I think that postmodernism, once it was out of the bag, became an unstoppable force in American society. Once we learned to see things not just as things, but as signs, as representations, it became impossible to go back to the old ways—ye old paradigm of steadfast belief in things like Universality, Objectivity, Big Ideas, Truth.
I, for one, embrace our new postmodern overlords. (Although they are not that new anymore.) Not just because of the nostalgia I feel for my own postmodern childhood. But because postmodernism is fun and playful and ultimately quite humbling, as we refuse to believe that things are simply as they are, but rather we must always question and disassemble everything about what we perceive and experience.
And if we want to ‘touch grass,’ as the young people today say, we still can.
We can step outside and literally touch the grass, and as long as I am not writing about said grass, not recording it on my camcorder like “Captain Video,” not thinking about looking up what type of grass it is on Wikipedia, just fucking touching it and feeling it through the skin of my fingers, then perhaps I can still touch something that is beyond the postmodern, something that is real. David, perhaps the antidote to postmodernity was here all along. I wish you could have felt it.
A final word…
I now offer personalized writing feedback & individual mentorship to other writers through 700/14! (And we’ve already got a great group of writers signed up and participating! Yay!) I call it the 700/14 masterclass. Signing up is simple. Click on the big purple button and become a paid subscriber to 700/14—for as little as $5 a month; the cost of a coffee once a month at your favorite coffee shop—and you’re automatically enrolled. You’ll get feedback on your own writing six times per year, and at the foundational membership level, you can also get biannual one-on-one mentorship calls with me. How about that!
Keep writing. Your voice is needed in this turbulent world. Sign up by clicking the purple button below.
Book club when?