The David Foster Wallace Reader
Page 119
“Federer Both Flesh and Not” originally published in the New York Times Magazine in 2006 under the title “Federer as Religious Experience,” and as “Federer Both Flesh and Not” in Both Flesh and Not (Little, Brown and Company, 2012).
Afterword to “The Planet Trillaphon as It Stands in Relation to the Bad Thing” copyright © 2014 by Kevin J. H. Dettmar
Afterword to The Broom of the System copyright © 2014 by Gerald Howard
Afterword to “Little Expressionless Animals” copyright © 2014 by Hari Kunzru
Afterword to Infinite Jest, “11 November” copyright © 2014 by Nam Le
Afterword to “Incarnations of Burned Children” copyright © 2014 by Nick Maniatis
Afterword to The Pale King, Chapter 36 copyright © 2014 by Deborah Treisman
Introduction to Teaching Materials copyright © 2014 by Sally Foster Wallace
Afterword to “Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley” copyright © 2014 by Mark Costello
Afterword to “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction” copyright © 2014 by David L. Ulin
Afterword to “Getting Away from Already Pretty Much Being Away from It All” copyright © 2014 by Anne Fadiman
Afterword to “Consider the Lobster” copyright © 2014 by Jo Ann Beard
Afterword to “Federer Both Flesh and Not” copyright © 2014 by Sven Birkerts
About the Author
David Foster Wallace was born in Ithaca, New York, in 1962 and raised in Illinois, where he was a regionally ranked junior tennis player. He received bachelor of arts degrees in philosophy and English from Amherst College; his senior English thesis, the novel The Broom of the System, was published in 1987, and his senior philosophy thesis was published as Fate, Time, and Language in 2010. He earned a master of fine arts at the University of Arizona. His second novel, Infinite Jest, was published in 1996. He also published the story collections Girl with Curious Hair, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, and Oblivion; the essay collections A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again and Consider the Lobster; a book about hip-hop, written with his friend Mark Costello, Signifying Rappers; and a book about infinity, Everything and More. Over the years Wallace taught at Emerson College, Illinois State University, and Pomona College. He was awarded the MacArthur Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Award, and the Whiting Writers’ Award and served on the Usage Panel for The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. He died in 2008. His last novel, The Pale King, was published in 2011 and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
ALSO BY DAVID FOSTER WALLACE
The Broom of the System
Girl with Curious Hair
Infinite Jest
A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
Everything and More
Oblivion
Consider the Lobster
McCain’s Promise
This Is Water
The Pale King
a. From Comstock, Posner, and Duquette, ‘The Laughing Pathologists: Exemplary Works of the Anticonfluential Après Garde: Some Analyses of the Movement Toward Stasis in North American Conceptual Film (w/ Beth B., Vivienne Dick, James O. Incandenza, Vigdis Simpson, E. and K. Snow).’ ONANite Film and Cartridge Studies Annual, vol. 8, nos. 1-3 (Year of D.P. from the A.H.), pp. 44–117.
b. With the possible exception of Cage III—Free Show, Incandenza’s Cage series bears no discernible relation to Sidney Peterson’s 1947 classic, The Cage.
c. See Romney and Sperber, ‘Has James O. Incandenza Ever Even Once Produced One Genuinely Original or Unappropriated or Nonderivative Thing?’ Post-Millennium Film Cartridge Journal, nos. 7–9 (Fall/Winter, Y.P.W.), pp. 4-26.
d. E. Duquette, ‘Beholden to Vision: Optics and Desire in Four Après Garde Films,’ Cartridge Quarterly East, vol. 4 no. 2, Y.W.-Q.M.D., pp. 35-39.
e. Anonymous, ‘Seeing v. Believing,’ Cartridge Quarterly East, vol. 4 no. 4, Y.W.-Q.M.D., pp. 93–95.
f. Ibid.
1 The multiform shapes the therapist’s mated fingers assumed nearly always resembled, for the depressed person, various forms of geometrically diverse cages, an association which the depressed person had not shared with the therapist because its symbolic significance seemed too overt and simple-minded to waste their time together on. The therapist’s fingernails were long and shapely and well maintained, whereas the depressed person’s fingernails were compulsively bitten so short and ragged that the quick sometimes protruded and began spontaneously to bleed.
2 (i.e., one of which purulent wounds)
3 The depressed person’s therapist was always extremely careful to avoid appearing to judge or blame the depressed person for clinging to her defenses, or to suggest that the depressed person had in any way consciously chosen or chosen to cling to a chronic depression whose agony made her (i.e., the depressed person’s) every waking hour feel like more than any person could possibly endure. This renunciation of judgment or imposed value was held by the therapeutic school in which the therapist’s philosophy of healing had evolved over almost fifteen years of clinical experience to be integral to the combination of unconditional support and complete honesty about feelings which composed the nurturing professionalism required for a productive therapeutic journey toward authenticity and intrapersonal wholeness. Defenses against intimacy, the depressed person’s therapist’s experiential theory held, were nearly always arrested or vestigial survival-mechanisms; i.e., they had, at one time, been environmentally appropriate and necessary and had very probably served to shield a defenseless childhood psyche against potentially unbearable trauma, but in nearly all cases they (i.e., the defense-mechanisms) had become inappropriately imprinted and arrested and were now, in adulthood, no longer environmentally appropriate and in fact now, paradoxically, actually caused a great deal more trauma and pain than they prevented. Nevertheless, the therapist had made it clear from the outset that she was in no way going to pressure, hector, cajole, argue, persuade, flummox, trick, harangue, shame, or manipulate the depressed person into letting go of her arrested or vestigial defenses before she (i.e., the depressed person) felt ready and able to risk taking the leap of faith in her own internal resources and self-esteem and personal growth and healing to do so (i.e., to leave the nest of her defenses and freely and joyfully fly).
4 The therapist—who was substantially older than the depressed person but still younger than the depressed person’s mother, and who, other than in the condition of her fingernails, resembled that mother in almost no physical or stylistic respects—sometimes annoyed the depressed person with her habit of making a digiform cage in her lap and changing the shapes of the cage and gazing down at the geometrically diverse cages during their work together. Over time, however, as the therapeutic relationship deepened in terms of intimacy and sharing and trust, the sight of the digiform cages irked the depressed person less and less, eventually becoming little more than a distraction. Far more problematic in terms of the depressed person’s trust- and self-esteem-issues was the therapist’s habit of from time to time glancing up very quickly at the large sunburst-design clock on the wall behind the suede easy chair in which the depressed person customarily sat during their time together, glancing (i.e., the therapist glancing) very quickly and almost furtively at the clock, such that what came to bother the depressed person more and more over time was not that the therapist was looking at the clock but that the therapist was apparently trying to hide or disguise the fact that she was looking at the clock. The depressed person—who was agonizingly sensitive, she admitted, to the possibility that anyone she was trying to reach out and share with was secretly bored or repelled or desperate to get away from her as quickly as possible, and was commensurately hyper-vigilant about any slight movements or gestures which might imply that a listener was conscious of the time or eager for time to pass, and never once failed to notice when the therapist glanced ever so quickly either up at the clock or down at the slender, elegant wristwatch who
se timepiece rested hidden from the depressed person’s view against the underside of the therapist’s slim wrist—had finally, late in the first year of the therapeutic relationship, broken into sobs and shared that it made her feel totally demeaned and invalidated whenever the therapist appeared to try to hide the fact that she wished to know the exact time. Much of the depressed person’s work with the therapist in the first year of her (i.e., the depressed person’s) journey toward healing and intrapersonal wholeness had concerned her feelings of being uniquely and repulsively boring or convoluted or pathetically self-involved, and of not being able to trust that there was genuine interest and compassion and caring on the part of a person to whom she was reaching out for support; and in fact the therapeutic relationship’s first significant breakthrough, the depressed person told members of her Support System in the agonizing period following the therapist’s death, had come when the depressed person, late in the therapeutic relationship’s second year, had gotten sufficiently in touch with her own inner worth and resources to be able to share assertively with the therapist that she (i.e., the respectful but assertive depressed person) would prefer it if the therapist would simply look openly up at the helioform clock or openly turn her wrist over to look at the underside’s wristwatch instead of apparently believing—or at least engaging in behavior which made it appear, from the depressed person’s admittedly hypersensitive perspective, as if the therapist believed—that the depressed person could be fooled by her dishonestly sneaking an observation of the time into some gesture that tried to look like a meaningless glance at the wall or an absent manipulation of the cagelike digiform shape in her lap.
Another important piece of therapeutic work the depressed person and her therapist had accomplished together—a piece of work which the therapist had said she personally felt constituted a seminal leap of growth and deepening of the trust and level of honest sharing between them—occurred in the therapeutic relationship’s third year, when the depressed person had finally confessed that she also felt it was demeaning to be spoken to as the therapist sometimes spoke to her, i.e., that the depressed person felt patronized, condescended to, and/or treated like a child at those times during their work together when the therapist would start tiresomely lallating over and over and over again what her therapeutic philosophies and goals and wishes for the depressed person were; plus not to mention, while they were on the whole subject, that she (i.e., the depressed person) also sometimes felt demeaned and resentful whenever the therapist would look up from her lap’s hands’ cage at the depressed person and her (i.e., the therapist’s) face would once again assume its customary expression of calm and boundless patience, an expression which the depressed person admitted she knew (i.e., the depressed person knew) was intended to communicate unjudging attention and interest and support but which nevertheless sometimes from the depressed person’s perspective looked to her more like emotional detachment, like clinical distance, like mere professional interest the depressed person was purchasing instead of the intensely personal interest and empathy and compassion she often felt she had spent her whole life starved for. It made her angry, the depressed person confessed; she often felt angry and resentful at being nothing but the object of the therapist’s professional compassion or of the putative “friends” in her pathetic “Support System” ’s charity and abstract guilt.
5 Though the depressed person had, she later acknowledged to her Support System, been anxiously watching the therapist’s face for evidence of a negative reaction as she (i.e., the depressed person) opened up and vomited out all these potentially repulsive feelings about the therapeutic relationship, she nevertheless was by this point in the session benefiting enough from a kind of momentum of emotional honesty to be able to open up even further and tearfully share with the therapist that it also felt demeaning and even somehow abusive to know that, for example, today (i.e., the day of the depressed person and her therapist’s seminally honest and important piece of relationship-work together), at the moment the depressed person’s time with the therapist was up and they had risen from their respective recliners and hugged stiffly goodbye until their next appointment together, that at that very moment all of the therapist’s seemingly intensely personally focused attention and support and interest in the depressed person would be withdrawn and then effortlessly transferred onto the next pathetic contemptible whiny self-involved snaggletoothed pig-nosed fat-thighed shiteater who was waiting out there right outside reading a used magazine and waiting to lurch in and cling pathetically to the hem of the therapist’s pelisse for an hour, so desperate for a personally interested friend that they would pay almost as much per month for the pathetic temporary illusion of a friend as they paid in fucking rent. The depressed person knew all too perfectly well, she conceded—holding up a pica-gnawed hand to prevent the therapist from interrupting—that the therapist’s professional detachment was in fact not at all incompatible with true caring, and that the therapist’s careful maintenance of a professional, rather than a personal, level of caring and support and commitment meant that this support and caring could be counted on to always Be There for the depressed person and not fall prey to the normal vicissitudes of less professional and more personal interpersonal relationships’ inevitable conflicts and misunderstandings or natural fluctuations in the therapist’s own personal mood and emotional availability and capacity for empathy on any particular day; not to mention that her (i.e., the therapist’s) professional detachment meant that at least within the confines of the therapist’s chilly but attractive home office and of their appointed three hours together each week the depressed person could be totally honest and open about her own feelings without ever having to be afraid that the therapist would take those feelings personally and become angry or cold or judgmental or derisive or rejecting or would ever shame or deride or abandon the depressed person; in fact that, ironically, in many ways, as the depressed person said she was all too aware, the therapist was actually the depressed person’s—or at any rate the isolated, agonized, needy, pathetic, selfish, spoiled, wounded-Inner-Child part of the depressed person’s—absolutely ideal personal friend: i.e. here, after all, was a person (viz., the therapist) who would always Be There to listen and really care and empathize and be emotionally available and giving and to nurture and support the depressed person and yet would demand absolutely nothing back from the depressed person in terms of empathy or emotional support or in terms of the depressed person ever really caring about or even considering the therapist’s own valid feelings and needs as a human being. The depressed person also knew perfectly well, she had acknowledged, that it was in fact the $90 an hour which made the therapeutic relationship’s simulacrum of friendship so ideally one-sided: i.e. the only expectation or demand the therapist placed on the depressed person was for the contracted hourly $90; after that one demand was satisfied, everything in the relationship got to be for and about the depressed person. On a rational, intellectual, “head” level, the depressed person was completely aware of all these realities and compensations, she told the therapist, and so of course felt that she (i.e., the depressed person) had no rational reason or excuse for feeling the vain, needy, childish feelings she had just taken the unprecedented emotional risk of sharing that she felt; and yet the depressed person confessed to the therapist that she nevertheless still felt, on a more basic, emotionally intuitive or “gut” level, that it truly was demeaning and insulting and pathetic that her chronic emotional pain and isolation and inability to reach out forced her to spend $1,080 a month to purchase what was in many respects a kind of fantasy-friend who could fulfill her childishly narcissistic fantasies of getting her own emotional needs met by another without having to reciprocally meet or empathize with or even consider the other’s own emotional needs, an other-directed empathy and consideration which the depressed person tearfully confessed she sometimes despaired of ever having it in her to give. The depressed person here inserted that she often worried, despite the n
umerous traumas she had suffered at the hands of attempted relationships with men, that it was in fact her own inability to get outside her own toxic neediness and to Be There for another and truly emotionally give which had made those attempts at intimate, mutually nurturing partner-relationships with men such an agonizingly demeaning across-the-board failure.
The depressed person had further inserted in her seminal sharing with the therapist, she later told the select elite “core” members of her Support System after the therapist’s death, that her (i.e., the depressed person’s) resentments about the $1,080/month cost of the therapeutic relationship were in truth less about the actual expense—which she freely admitted she could afford—than about the demeaning idea of paying for artificially one-sided friendship and narcissistic-fantasy-fulfillment, then had laughed hollowly (i.e., the depressed person had laughed hollowly during the original insertion in her sharing with the therapist) to indicate that she heard and acknowledged the unwitting echo of her cold, niggardly, emotionally unavailable parents in the stipulation that what was objectionable was not the actual expense but the idea or “principle” of the expense. What it really felt like, the depressed person later admitted to supportive friends that she had confessed to the compassionate therapist, was as if the $90 hourly therapeutic fee were almost a kind of ransom or “protection money,” purchasing the depressed person an exemption from the scalding internal shame and mortification of telephoning distant former friends she hadn’t even laid fucking eyes on in years and had no legitimate claim on the friendship of anymore and telephoning them uninvited at night and intruding on their functional and blissfully ignorantly joyful if perhaps somewhat shallow lives and leaning shamelessly on them and constantly reaching out and trying to articulate the essence of the depression’s terrible and unceasing pain even when it was this very pain and despair and loneliness that rendered her, she knew, far too emotionally starved and needy and self-involved to be able ever to truly Be There in return for her long-distance friends to reach out to and share with and lean on in return, i.e. that hers (i.e., the depressed person’s) was a contemptibly greedy and narcissistic omnineediness that only a complete idiot would not fully expect the members of her so-called “Support System” to detect all too easily in her, and to be totally repelled by, and to stay on the telephone with only out of the barest and most abstract human charity, all the while rolling their eyes and making faces and looking at the clock and wishing that the telephone call were over or that she (i.e., the pathetically needy depressed person on the phone) would call anyone else but her (i.e., the bored, repelled, eye-rolling putative “friend”) or that she’d never historically been assigned to room with the depressed person or had never even gone to that particular boarding school or even that the depressed person had never been born and didn’t even exist, such that the whole thing felt totally, unendurably pathetic and demeaning “if the truth be told,” if the therapist really wanted the “totally honest and uncensored sharing” she always kept “alleging [she] want[ed],” the depressed person later confessed to her Support System she had hissed derisively at the therapist, her face (i.e., the depressed person’s face during the seminal but increasingly ugly and humiliating third-year therapy session) working in what she imagined must have been a grotesque admixture of rage and self-pity and complete humiliation. It had been the imaginative visualization of what her own enraged face must have looked like which had caused the depressed person to begin at this late juncture in the session to weep, pule, snuffle, and sob in real earnest, she shared later with trusted friends. For no, if the therapist really wanted the truth, the actual “gut”-level truth underneath all her childishly defensive anger and shame, the depressed person had shared from a hunched and near-fetal position beneath the sunburst clock, sobbing but making a conscious choice not to bother wiping her eyes or even her nose, the depressed person really felt that what was really unfair was that she felt able—even here in therapy with the trusted and compassionate therapist—that she felt able to share only painful circumstances and historical insights about her depression and its etiology and texture and numerous symptoms instead of feeling truly able to communicate and articulate and express the depression’s terrible unceasing agony itself, an agony that was the overriding and unendurable reality of her every black minute on earth—i.e., not being able to share the way it truly felt, what the depression made her feel like inside on a daily basis, she had wailed hysterically, striking repeatedly at her recliner’s suede armrests—or to reach out and communicate and express it to someone who could not only listen and understand and care but could or would actually feel it with her (i.e., feel what the depressed person felt). The depressed person confessed to the therapist that what she felt truly starved for and really truly fantasized about was having the ability to somehow really truly literally “share” it (i.e., the chronic depression’s ceaseless torment). She said that the depression felt as if it was so central and inescapable to her identity and who she was as a person that not being able to share the depression’s inner feeling or even really describe what it felt like felt to her for example like feeling a desperate, life-or-death need to describe the sun in the sky and yet being able or permitted only to point to shadows on the ground. She was so very tired of pointing at shadows, she had sobbed. She (i.e., the depressed person) had then immediately broken off and laughed hollowly at herself and apologized to the therapist for employing such a floridly melodramatic and self-pitying analogy. The depressed person shared all this later with her Support System, in great detail and sometimes more than once a night, as part of her grieving process following the therapist’s death from homeopathic caffeinism, including her (i.e., the depressed person’s) reminiscence that the therapist’s display of compassionate and unjudging attention to everything the depressed person had finally opened up and vented and hissed and spewed and whined and puled about during the traumatically seminal breakthrough session had been so formidable and uncompromising that she (i.e., the therapist) had blinked far less often than any nonprofessional listener the depressed person had ever shared with face-to-face had ever blinked. The two currently most trusted and supportive “core” members of the depressed person’s Support System had responded, almost verbatim, that it sounded as though the depressed person’s therapist had been very special, and that the depressed person clearly missed her very much; and the one particularly valuable and empathetic and elite, physically ill “core” friend whom the depressed person leaned on more heavily than on any other support during the grieving process suggested that the single most loving and appropriate way to honor both the therapist’s memory and the depressed person’s own grief over her loss might be for the depressed person to try to become as special and caring and unflaggingly nurturing a friend to herself as the late therapist had been.