Anti-Climacus

Yesterday was spent working on footnotes, which means periodic distractions to avoid going crazy over footnotes. One of those distractions was Jonathan Franzen's essay on his trip to Robinson Crusoe's island, re-reading Robinson Crusoe, and David Foster Wallace. My initial impression was that combining all of these in any satisfactory way would be difficult-to-impossible. It's a fine essay, but for the most part it reads too much of over-editing, switching too neatly between topics. In other words, the combination of technical ability and calculated attempts to provoke an emotional response that make me not really like Jonathan Franzen's work.

That said, the parts on DFW are amazing. It comes off as a working-through of Franzen's reactions to DFW's suicide, which manage to convey in equal measure his anger at his friend, his frustration at the decision-making that led Wallace to his suicide (no grotesquerie spared: apparently DFW made multiple elaborate plans for the act), and his recognition that he couldn't ultimately understand what his friend was going through. Thus:

A literary establishment that had never so much as short-listed one of his books for a national prize now united to declare him a lost national treasure. Of course, he was a national treasure, and, being a writer, he didn't 'belong' to his readers any less than to me. But if you happened to know that his actual character was more complex and dubious than he was getting credit for, and if you also knew that he was more lovable--funnier, sillier, needier, more poignantly at war with his demons, more lost, more childishly transparent in his lies and inconsistencies--than the benignant and morally clairvoyant artist/saint that had been made of him, it was still hard not to feel wounded by the part of him that had chosen the adulation of strangers over the love of the people closest to him.

Which is, I think, the sort of devotion one wants from one's friends, or at least I want from mine: not unaware of your faults, but dedicated to you all the same.