There is a weird ambient sameness to Wallace’s work. He was always asking essentially the same question. How do I recognize that other people are real, as I am? And the strange, quasi-mystical answer was always the same, too. You may have to give up your attachment to the “self.” I don’t mean that Wallace “preached” this moral in his work; when I think of a moralist I don’t think of a preacher. On the contrary, he was a writer who placed himself “in the hazard” of his own terms, undergoing them as real problems, both in life and on the page. For this reason, I suspect he will remain a writer who appeals, above all, to the young. It’s young people who best understand his sense of urgency, and who tend to take abstract existential questions like these seriously, as interrogations that relate directly to themselves. The struggle with ego, the struggle with the self, the struggle to allow other people to exist in their genuine “otherness”-these were aspects of Wallace’s own struggle. One way to read Brief Interviews is as a series of intimate confessions of “other blindness.” Confessions of solipsism, of misogyny, of ego, of control freakery, of cruelty, of snobbery, of sadism. Of that old Christian double bind: the wish to be seen to be good. Speaking of “The Depressed Person” he said: “That was the most painful thing I have ever done… [T]hat character is a part of me I hardly ever write about. There is a part of me that is just like that person.” And then there’s the moderately overweight careerist poet in “Death Is Not the End.” It’s about as far from an autobiographical portrait of Wallace as one can imagine, but it’s fueled with a disgust that feels somehow personal. Wallace was constitutionally hard on himself, apparently compelled to confess not only to who he was but to who he dreaded being or becoming. “The fifty-six-year-old American poet, a Nobel Laureate,” recipient of basically every award and grant literary America has to offer (except the Guggenheim [88] a fact which seems to plague him, and pops up in a footnote apropos of nothing, as if it had thrust itself to the surface of the story in subconscious fury), is “known in American literary circles as ‘the poet’s poet’ or sometimes simply ‘the Poet,’ ” and he is truly selfhood experienced in its unbearable fullness. We get a meticulous description of his self, the exact spot in which he sits (in a lounger, by a pool, in a garden), as well as his exact coordinate in relation to the sun (as if it revolved around him). In short (well, in two gigantic recursive sentences), Wallace annihilates him. God help the man who has chosen to worship himself! Whose self really is no more than the awards he has won, the prestige he has earned, the wealth he has amassed. In our last glimpse of the Poet he is surrounded by his expensive shrubbery, which is “motionless green vivid and inescapable and not like anything else in the world in either appearance and suggestion.” A footnote adds: “That is not wholly true.” Green, vivid, motionless, inescapable? Sounds like money to me.

In The Gift, a book that meant a lot to Wallace, the cultural anthropologist Lewis Hyde examines the different modes in which cultures and individuals deal with the concept of gifts and giving. He offers a fine description of the kind of swollen self we find in “Death Is Not the End”: “The narcissist feels his gifts come from himself. He works to display himself, not to suffer change.” The father in “On His Deathbed, Holding Your Hand” makes a similar judgment about his Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright son: he is appalled by his (i.e., the son’s) sense of his own “limitless gifts unquote” and the admiration they arouse in everyone:

As if he actually deserved this sort of-as if it were the most natural thing in the world…-as if this sort of love were due him, itself of nature, inevitable as the sunrise, never a thought, never a moment’s doubt that he deserves it all and more. The very thought of it chokes me. How many years he took from us. Our Gift. Genitive, ablative, nominative-the accidence of “gift.”

To Wallace, a gift truly was an accident; a chance, a fortuitous circumstance. Born intelligent, born with perfect pitch, with mathematical ability, with a talent for tennis-in what sense are we ever the proprietors of these blessings? What rights accrue to us because of them? How could we ever claim to truly own them?

It’s very interesting to me that this attitude toward gifts should have within it a current that is strongly anti-American, being both contra “rights” and contra “ownership.” I’ve always had the sense, philosophically speaking, that Wallace’s ethical ideas were profoundly un-American: he had more in common with the philosophical current that runs from Kant’s “realm of ends” through Simone Weils “sacred humans” and on to John Rawls’s “veil of ignorance,” [89] than the Hobbes/Smith/Locke waters from which the idea of America was drawn. Wallace’s work rejects “goal-directed” philosophies of human happiness, both because they isolate the self (the pursuit of happiness is a pursuit we undertake alone) and because this Western obsession with happiness as a goal makes people childishly “pain-averse,” allergic to the one quality that is, in Wallace’s view, the true constant of human life: “Look at utilitarianism… and you see a whole teleology predicated on the idea that the best human life is one that maximizes the pleasure-to-pain ratio. God, I know this sounds priggish of me. All I’m saying is that it’s shortsighted to blame TV. It’s simply another symptom. TV didn’t invent our aesthetic childishness here any more than the Manhattan Project invented aggression… ” His stories repel the idea that a just society can come from the contract made between self-interested or egoistic individuals, or that it is one’s “personhood” that guarantees one a bigger slice of the pie. (The fat poet’s talents or personal merits can’t make him more worthy than anyone else.)

And in a few extreme cases, Wallace’s stories go further, lining up behind a quasi-mystic such as Weil, who, like the Buddhists, abandons “Personhood” entirely: “What is sacred in a human being is the impersonal in him… Our personality is the part of us which belongs to error and sin. The whole effort of the mystic has always been to become such that there is no part left in his soul to say ‘I’.” [90] Consequently, the statement You have no right to hurt me is to Weil meaningless, for rights are a concept that attaches to “personhood” and one person can always feel their “rights” to be more rightful that another’s. What you are doing to me is not just-this, for Weil, is the correct and sacred phrase. “The spirit of justice and truth is nothing else,” she writes, “but a certain kind of attention, which is pure love.”

Isn’t it exactly this “certain kind of attention” that Wallace explores in B.I. #20 (sometimes known as The Granola Cruncher)? It is the darkest story in the collection, [91] and it has an extreme setup, even by Wallace’s standards: a hippie girl, viciously raped by a psychopath, decides to create, in the middle of the act, a “soul connection” with her rapist because she “believes that sufficient love and focus can penetrate even psychosis and evil.” In the process she is able to forget herself, and focus on his misery-even to feel pity for him. But this all happened some time ago: when the story opens we are being retold it as an anecdote by a man who has himself heard it as anecdote:

B.I. #20 12-96

NEW HAVEN CT