The Struggle Itself Is Enough To Fill A Man's Heart

In his excellent The Art of Fiction, John Gardner makes the argument that:

“To write with taste, in the highest sense, is to write with the assumption that one out of a hundred people who read one’s work may be dying, or have some loved one dying; to write so that no one commits suicide, no one despairs; to write, as Shakespeare wrote, so that people understand, sympathize, see the universality of pain, and feel strengthened, if not directly encouraged to live on.”

I first read Gardner's book in my very-early twenties when I first started trying seriously to write, and that particular passage -- and its argument about one's moral obligation to humankind -- became incredibly important to me. I take Gardner to mean that one has a moral duty to be life-affirming, to suggest ways out of darkness, and to generally echo Albert Camus' solution to the "one truly serious philosophical problem." (This is not to say that art can't be dark, pessimistic, or immoral, or that it can't suggest that evil often wins or that darkness can overcome, only that art -- or in Gardner's rendering, art "with taste" -- ought not leave someone in greater pain or despair. Vonnegut, for example, was no cheerleader for the human condition, but his bleak humor and rationality were fireflies in the gloom.)

David Foster Wallace was a writer who had some impact on me in my Boston years and his death this past weekend has stuck with me. My initial response -- having heard of Wallace's death from a friend's e-mail on Sunday morning -- was probably too crass and dismissive, and tied into the problems I'd developed with Wallace's writing style. An incredibly smart and exacting writer, Wallace was also interested in formal and stylistic innovation which -- at times -- seemed a bit too clever for my tastes. There's a lot of Wallace that's worth reading-- particularly in Girl With Curious Hair and A Supposedly Fun Thing... -- but the cleverness, the syntactic exercises, and his headiness eventually wore out on me. Infinite Jest, while a book I thoroughly enjoyed reading while in the act of reading it, sort of lives up to its title too exactingly.

Since Sunday, though, I've been thinking a lot about Wallace's story "The Depressed Person" , which I read in Harper's Magazine when it was published in 1998 (strangely, it seems a lot fresher in my mind than that -- I would have guessed it appeared in this decade). While not a very dramatic story, Wallace establishes and cements a mindset of a depressed woman; all of the action of the story takes place in its footnotes. Depression, as the story presents it, is a kind of extreme self-centeredness, an obsession with self that washes out the rest of the world (including, within the story, the illness and death by cancer of the depressed person's closest friend). Wallace's story -- and the idea that depression is a malady of solipsism -- drew some heat in Harper's letters pages, but I think it ultimately adheres to Gardner's definition of writing with taste. It's idea is one that has helped me out of a dark spot or two, now somewhat complicated by Wallace's apparent suicide.

At an important time in my life, the right person gave me the right book. That book says:

At that subtle moment when man glances backward over his life, Sisyphus returning toward his rock, in that slight pivoting he contemplates that series of unrelated actions which become his fate, created by him, combined under his memory's eye and soon sealed by his death. Thus, convinced of the wholly human origin of all that is human, a blind man eager to see who knows that the night has no end, he is still on the go. The rock is still rolling.

As Lou Reed said, my life was saved by rock and roll.