On "The Depressed Person," David Foster Wallace, and the Art of Awful People
On “The Depressed Person,” David Foster Wallace, and the Art of Awful People
by Ashira Shirali
When I first read David Foster Wallace’s short story ‘The Depressed Person’ at sixteen, I was struck by how much of myself I saw in the story’s unnamed protagonist. The titular depressed person thinks such-and-such, but such-and-such must be qualified by so-and-so. She imagines her friends wincing when she calls. Battered by her self-awareness, she tells her friends she is aware she is burdening them, but these confessions and the following reassurances only strengthen the impression of being a burden, unleashing another wave of piercing self-consciousness.
In high school, I often asked my friends if they wanted me around. “But are you sure I’m not annoying you? I can leave if you want.” I asked till they huffed no, I was not annoying them. Guilt was a recursive function. I was very aware that repeatedly asking if one is annoying is itself annoying, but I couldn’t not ask because of the nagging fear that I was being tolerated, like mosquitoes on summer evenings.
Guilt was a recursive function.
The reflection I saw in ‘The Depressed Person’ made me Google DFW. I like thick books, but I couldn’t get past the first of the thousand seventy-nine pages that make up Infinite Jest.
I’ve met the human version of Infinite Jest. He uses words you have to look up in casual conversation. He explains simple concepts to you as if he’s describing the main engine of a space shuttle. When you are both in a larger group, he doesn’t pay attention when you’re talking, and then repeats your exact point in his booming voice. I feel a kinship with the Amazon customer who titled their review “A favourite among douchebag pseudo-intellectual bros who read the book for bragging rights.”
While Infinite Jest is the boulder one smacks into when starting down this path, DFW’s abusive past has to be spotted in the undergrowth meters away. He threw a coffee table at his then-girlfriend Mary Karr, tried to push her out of a moving vehicle, and stalked her five-year-old home from school.
The same man was deeply depressed and committed suicide in 2008.
And the same man wrote ‘The Depressed Person,’ which made a melting sunset of my heart because someone finally understood the self-flagellation which confused my friends.
While Infinite Jest is the boulder one smacks into when starting down this path, DFW’s abusive past has to be spotted in the undergrowth meters away.
I once fought with one of these friends about whether streaming a monster’s mixtape makes you a monster. For years I had been a Good Liberal, educated by Tumblr threads, closing the tab if YouTube auto-played Chris Brown’s latest. “I don’t care about that stuff anymore,” I told the friend while looking at my phone. I was sick of being told what art I could and couldn’t consume, I decided.
A sample of the sophistry—DFW must face police and legal action for his abuse, which is unrelated to his short story. When I buy his work, I am paying him solely for producing the work, and I am not responsible for what he does when he is not producing said work.
Much of it sounded like the narrator of Infinite Jest.
The feeling that I was horribly wrong never left me. I distracted myself from the fact that I was building castles in the air by giving my castle several turrets, a portcullis and a drawbridge. I read every op-ed and essay I could find on separating art from the artist. In Roxane Gay’s Marie Claire essay, she writes, “It is not difficult to dismiss the work of predators and angry men because agonizing over a predator’s legacy would mean there is some price I am willing to let victims pay for the sake of good art, when the truth is no half hour of television is so excellent that anyone’s suffering is recompense.”
I had been the child that wanted only the ice cream fallen on the sidewalk, not another of the same kind or even
a better one.
I imagined how I would feel if I were abused by a man who happened to be powerful. How I would feel if people continued buying his work, feeding his power, and insisting it had nothing to do with me. Gay pointed out what should have been obvious—there is tons of good art made by non-abusive people out there. I had been the child that wanted only the ice cream fallen on the sidewalk, not another of the same kind or even a better one.
Choosing the work of a problematic person (who is often straight, white and male) because it’s canon deprives an underrated writer (who often belongs to a marginalized group or groups) of the chance to be read. This choice cements the problematic person’s place in the canon while ensuring the gate is firmly locked to the underrated writer.
I haven’t tried reading DFW’s magnum opus again. Instead, I’ve started Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. It is infinitely better.
Ashira Shirali is from Gurgaon, India. Her stories have been shortlisted for the H. G. Wells Short Story Competition's junior prize, the Adroit Prize for Prose and other contests. Her work has appeared in Cosmonauts Avenue and Hobart (web). A former Adroit Journal summer mentee, she reads fiction submissions for New England Review, Storm Cellar and Nat. Brut. She studies English and Creative Writing at Princeton University.