Started in March 2021, finished in March 2023. Reading this book was a supposedly fun thing I’ll never do again.
DFW is better than you. He sees more than you. He sits in the corner laughing to himself, scribbling in his little black notebook. He’s laughing at your ignorance. At the way you, like a train on a track, or a player in an age-old play, engage in the comical farce that is the modern world. He knows everything about you. He is the narrator and you are the subject.
I can see why his cynicism has the appeal it does. His cultural critiques are prescient and clear-headed, and just by reading them you feel like you, too, are head and shoulders above the hoi polloi. Somewhat ironically, in writing as if he is the only sentient character in a grand show, he makes you feel like the main character.
It’s appropriate that there is some sort of meta-irony involved in the reading of this book, because there was clearly much irony involved in writing it. E Unibus Pluram - which will no doubt be one of the most memorable essays I will ever read – is an essay about irony as a corporate tool. While he doesn’t quite utilize irony to the capitalistic extent of, say, TV commercials, the parallels still stand: His essays are so successful (in my theory, at least) because they cater to the our collective need to feel like individuals. He appeals to the masses by appealing to the individual. You know who else relies on this power? What other community bands together around scorn and solipsism?
Incels.
It feels scuzzy to compare such a cherished writer to the incel subculture, but it’s too obvious to ignore. There is scorn at the bottom of DFW’s writing. Scorn because he is more conscious than the people around him, and this makes him excluded. He repeatedly sexualizes teenagers and makes jealous remarks about how much sex they are having (in the Ticket to the Fair essay in particular). He has a fascination with masculinity, and a derision for femininity – a derision which extends inarguably beyond his writing and into his real life .
So there it is. I loved most of the essays in this book. They were validating and made me feel more special and enlightened for reading them. But I am not special, I am not enlightened, and David Foster Wallace was not not an incel.