Postmortem excising | DFW
I’m really surprised the publisher did this, but I guess I shouldn’t be. The essay is all about trying to empathize with other people’s pain, so this seems like the wrong choice to me.
I like VQR’s take on it:
Wallace, like any other artist, deserves to be examined in his totality, while keeping in mind the essential distinctions between the life and the work. References to suicide in his fiction and essays may be craters that can’t be filled, but we must still look at them all the same, just as we would examine a ruined building to understand the cost of war or would establish a commission to fully investigate the Bush administration’s application of torture and learn how it can be prevented in the future. To do otherwise is to imply that we can’t handle what’s right in front of us. It also carries the implication that Wallace was somehow wrong in discussing these issues at all, or that we will only listen to a gifted artist when it’s convenient.
