Finding the Unlovable Object Lovable: Empathy and Depression in David Foster Wallace

Abstract

Finding the Unlovable Object Lovable:Empathy and Depression in David Foster Wallace Mikkel Krause Frantzen (bio) The spirit of justice and truth is nothing else but a certain kind of attention, which is pure love. Simone Weil In some oft-quoted lines from his famous 1993 interview with Larry McCaffery, David Foster Wallace declares, "We all suffer alone in the real world. True empathy's impossible. But if a piece of fiction can allow us imaginatively to identify with a character's pain, we might then also more easily conceive of others identifying with their own. This is nourishing, redemptive; we become less alone inside. It might just be that simple."1 It is indeed well known that Wallace who died by suicide in 2008 after suffering from episodes of severe depression for most of his adult life, spent his career trying to work out the relation between empathy and fiction. It comes as no surprise, then, that the question of empathy in Wallace's fiction, as Aili Petterson Peeker writes, "is a recurring and recently flourishing subject across the field of Wallace studies."2 What these studies often appear to forget or neglect, however, is the connection between psychopathology and empathy in the literature of Wallace.3 In particular, Wallace's depictions of depression make it all too clear that one of the primary symptoms of depression is a total loss of empathy. Or so I argue in the first part of this article by analyzing the short story "The Depressed Person" from the collection Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (1999). In this story, the depressed female protagonist is so caught up in what Franco Berardi calls the [End Page 259] "obsessive rhythm of depression" that she has lost any sense of the other.4 This is indeed Wallace's diagnosis here (and elsewhere), but it is crucial to remember that for Wallace, a critical diagnosis is never enough in itself; literature must take the form of some kind of cure. Accordingly, his work can be perceived as a literary attempt to restore or repair the relation to the other, that is, as an attempt to carry out what he famously called "fictional CPR" in his interview with McCaffery.5 "The Depressed Person," however, offers no such CPR; it provides no remedy, no resynchronized rhythm, no recovery of the other. In the second part of the article I thus turn to the brutal story "B.I. #20 12–96: New Haven CT"—the penultimate tale in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. It is a story about a man who tells a story about a woman he met who told him a story about a time when she was hitchhiking and got picked up by a man who turned out to be psychopath and a rapist and who could have ended up killing her. In the end, the woman saves her life by way of a radical act of empathy. As I aim to demonstrate, the empathy evinced in this story goes beyond any conventional understanding of the term. Though some readers of Wallace—and even Wallace himself—at times seem satisfied with viewing empathy, quite trivially, as the affective and imaginative operation of putting oneself in the proverbial other's shoes, the story demonstrates that it is more complicated.6 It is not "that simple" after all: empathy is not simply an operation through which you try to feel or imagine what another person feels. Thus, my take is quite different from, for example, Martha Nussbaum's conceptualization of the relation between literature and empathy.7 Instead, I claim that empathy in Wallace is much closer to the paradoxical logic of Kierkegaard's conception of love. In fact, I read "B.I. #20" as a radicalized and even perverted version of Kierkegaard's interpretation of the Good Samaritan (in Works of Love specifically), arguing that this particular story by Wallace is not about practicing a love of or an empathy for the other but about presupposing the capacity for love and empathy in the other. The conclusion I arrive at may thus seem troubling and disturbing at first: that Wallace asks his readers to consider the victim's empathy...