David Foster Wallace in "This Is Water": Enlightened Intellectual or Pretentious Jerk?
He had me at first—the opening anecdote about the two fish was funny, and its metaphor for the ubiquitous realities we often forget to notice thought-provoking. And upon rereading it I realized it held up much better; most of what he was saying was, truly, deeply honest and thought-provoking, and I appreciated the message of questioning and fighting what we unconsciously accept and the detrimental mindsets we cling to complicitly. But the whole time I couldn’t shake the strange, almost slimy in quality, pretentiousness that seemed to bleed off the words. I didn’t understand the recurring scorn of those “other” commencement speeches as “grandly inspirational” but empty, when this one seemed to be teetering dangerously on the same extremity of that spectrum, if on the opposite side.
My biggest gripe is with the supermarket-shopping description. Wallace gives a frankly alarming account of the “petty, frustrating crap” one must experience to just pick up your supper supplies after a long day at work, filled with stupid inconveniences and stupid, infuriating people. This, he claims, is the reality of the boredom and routine of the “real world” the college graduates are still seeing with starry-eyed idealism. Which is true. Which is fine on its own. But then in this little cynical universe we finally get to the end of the checkout line, which is great because now David Foster Wallace can finally go home and stop mentally screaming and shaking his fist at the world, but first we must be reminded that we can’t take out our fury on the lady at the register, because the “daily tedium and meaningless” of her job “surpasses the imagination of any of us here at a prestigious college.”
Which, okay. I guess we can just ignore the 22.5% of high school students who have a job, or the 44.3% of college students who did in October 2023. Or the fact that students of a prestigious college, a private, liberal arts one with appalling tuition rates at that, probably don't consider themselves above the lowly cashier, and are probably very well-equipped to understand tedium, whether that be because of school or work, and the anxiety of living “on their own,” worrying about their classes and future careers and affording college and the state of the world that they are being thrown in.
Thus, the whole spiel about Wallace using this platform to do the grim but necessary work of preparing college students for a world they were probably not aware of is oddly tone-deaf. Not to say that every college student is perfectly aware and prepared for it—but the notion that there is some mystical exclusivity of the pain of adult life versus college and student life, especially since all graduating seniors are adults already, I don’t believe is accurate, instead almost deliberately misleading, somewhat haughty and lacking in the very empathy that Wallace is so determined to preach to them.
Of course, I am a high school student, jobless and idealistic at that, so make of this what you will—but surely, this degree of pessimism isn’t normal? I can’t speak of the frustrations of adult life, but as a self-made spokesperson of teen angst, I was not under the impression that this state of rage at the world was our “natural, hard-wired, default setting.” I can see myself experiencing this after doing badly on a test, or because of a mood swing, or because I am hungry or sleep-deprived—but without these triggers, which Wallace acknowledges, I don’t know how someone without anger issues or depression would be in the aforementioned perpetual state of frustration all of the time. Given the fickleness of human emotions, it seems instead like a normal emotional response to something happening in your environment, something easily remedied with food or sleep or watching a comfort show. And from this psychological standpoint, I don’t understand how “choosing” what to feel is any more useful than telling someone not to feel it in the first place. In therapy the common question to mitigate an emotional response is to first identify it. What am I feeling? How do I feel? But Wallace does not acknowledge this, and I say this not because he should be expected to cover the ground of everything ever in a 20-minute commencement speech, but because this kind of awareness is precisely what he opened the speech with, but is now absent from it entirely.
In fact, the insane word count being used to detail every mildly annoying thought Wallace must have seems to at once glorify cynicism and invalidate negativity. For noticing that the cashier is probably bored and acknowledging our boredom and tedium going through the motions of everyday life, Wallace seems to hail himself as intellectual, enlightened, insightful, sagacious, simply more perceptive and meta above the rest of us. But because of this, he also seems dismissive and frustrated toward the existence of his own feelings of tedium and natural, unavoidable sentiments of repulsion. This is evident in the very message woven throughout the piece—we can choose what to experience, which while valid, also means that failure to do so for whatever reason under the Wallace Bible means the only blame is on yourself.
To me, this is also strange, given how so much of the speech can be excerpted as evidence of the tolls of capitalism on the individual’s quality of life. Grocery shopping after your white-collar, 9-to-5 job during rush hour is probably the pinnacle of our everyday existence in capitalism. Even more so is the worshipping of money, beauty, and power, name-dropped by Wallace after the supermarket stanza, these infinite material things that is our obligation as consumers in capitalism to infinitely chase. How much of our everyday existence is affected by the systems we are trapped in? Unfortunately, this is never the focus of the piece—we are simply asked to appease the system by transcending ourselves, but not enough to question it. To an extreme, it seems that the audience of college graduates are being asked to forget ideas of reform, which at a small liberal arts school is probably not much of a reach, and submit obediently to the trenches of their future lives.
Is this brand of cynicism enlightenment? As the audience we are asked to think outside of ourselves, but the examples given in the speech only extend to people within one or two degrees of separation from us. We are tasked with imagining the lives of the driver in front of us who can’t drive, or the lady screaming at her child in the checkout line, and only when these people come into contact with our lives enough to annoy or infuriate us. But there is no allusion to those in wholly separate spheres of life—maybe the homeless in the city slums we have never been to, or starving children overseas, or simply other people we aren’t aware of on the daily, in other places or continents, or different lines of work, or different walks of live.
Interestingly, while your blog critiques Wallace (“In fact, the insane word count being used to detail every mildly annoying thought Wallace must have seems to at once glorify cynicism and invalidate negativity”) for spending so much time on minor annoyances, it also spends a lot of words analyzing every subtle part of his speech. That made me wonder if, in trying to point out Wallace’s supposed glorification of cynicism, the blog might be doing something similar looking closely at small details to make a bigger point. You also say that Wallace seems to consider himself superior to the audience (“Wallace seems to hail himself as intellectual, enlightened, insightful, sagacious, simply more perceptive and meta above the rest of us”). But later, you write, “To an extreme, it seems that the audience of college graduates are being asked to forget ideas of reform, which at a small liberal arts school is probably not much of a reach,” which seems to underestimate what those students might understand. It’s interesting because it creates a little tension: the blog points out Wallace’s seeming superiority, but then also makes assumptions about the audience, which feels kind of similar to me.
ReplyDeleteThank you for leaving such a thoughtful comment! I agree with a lot of your points; my first impression of Wallace's piece was very negative, but upon re-reading it I found it much more difficult to critique it with the same "cynicism" I first approached it with. While writing this I thought a lot about the reading in our pre-test about the critic who looks down his nose but never "does" anything, a character that I argue Wallace falls under but that I ultimately also became in writing it - if that makes sense. Rather than criticism of Wallace's speech, with the clickbait title admittedly suggests, I think this post fits better as my further contemplation of the ideas suggested by Wallace in "This Is Water", but not presented that way. Again, thank you for your comment and it's definitely given me a new perspective on this piece!
DeleteI love how you cleverly presented your argument with logic and also managed to weave in facts, such as the percentage of students with a job and also specific therapy methods. It is also intriguing how you critiqued his disapproval of worshipping something like money by referencing how the U.S. citizen is obligated to chase money, given the consumer culture caused by American policies supporting capitalism. I definitely agree that while he spends the whole piece talking about how we need to enlighten ourselves, he doesn’t exactly tell us how to do what he keeps suggesting, making the entire speech feel cryptic and vague. Overall your argument flows very smoothly, and I strongly agree with you on many of your points.
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