Mapping Meaning, the Journal (Issue No. 1)

David Foster Wallace, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and the
vapidity of the bottomless, postmodern machine.
Clark Nielson
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David Foster Wallace once told a reporter,
“look, man, we’d probably most of us agree
that these are dark times, and stupid ones,
but do we need fiction that does nothing but
dramatize how dark and stupid everything
is?” He stood against postmodern media that,
at its most base, turned mass entertainment
vapid, self-referential, and cynical. Wallace’s
confrontationally authentic writing style
leaves naked the tragedy surrounding his
premature death. He never wrote a word
about his own demons; he didn’t need
to. When Wallace wrote of depression,
he did so embarrassingly and knowingly,
acknowledging it as an ultimately selfish
addiction to self-centeredness. Wallace’s
suicide left an unintentional blackness to his
posthumous readers. However, do not add
nihilism and certainly not cynicism to this
equation. Davis Foster Wallace will not
be misunderstood.
limelight in the wake of his first novel, This
Side of Paradise. However, his fame did not
last during his lifetime, and Fitzgerald died a
drunken Hollywood scriptwriter, debatably
successful. Edmund Wilson, who outlived and
was close to Fitzgerald thought it “absurd that
his drunken, often silly college friend could
become a dying-and-reviving god.” In this and
similar cases, dying preceded the mythicizing
of the prematurely deceased artist as a
painfully simplified victim of his time. Think
Shelley. Think Mozart.
In this essay, I review how these two authors
overlap in a postmodern context. I’m
interested in how their works deal with the
consequences of losing self to expectation,
ironic living, and the inherent restrictions of
thought as a portal to “happy.” I gesticulate
towards the degrading and personal
repercussions of irony and cynicism.
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Wallace’s gift to explicitly depict the inner
turmoil of the mind hints towards the
causation of his suicide. His pen could
not keep up with the inspiration. The
contradiction of Wallace, that he understood
and could poignantly articulate the most
complex failings of human thought while
drowning in his own powerful truisms,
surfaces in his coldly controlled honesty.
Conversely, F. Scott Fitzgerald more directly
inserted his well-publicized personal issues
into the stories he composed; stories that
are a perfect model of how fiction should
be written. F. Scott Fitzgerald arrived in the
My parents turned me onto David Foster
Wallace. We would listen to his tapes on
road trips through the desert, and I would
fall asleep with my face against fogging
glass, hearing his voice, complete with the
footnotes, tell me about lobsters or tennis
or porn. I woke up once to his voice reading
“The View from Mrs. Thompson’s House,” and
this is the essay that was my introduction to
the terms “postmodern,” and “cynical.” In the
essay, he writes about the shameful thoughts
and the guilt these thoughts caused as he
watched the twin towers come down again
and again on September 11th, 2001, from the
living room of his neighbor’s home:
42 Mapping Meaning, the Journal