The Advanced U.S. Citizenship of David Foster Wallace

This chapter begins by examining the ways that Ludwig Wittgenstein and Stanley Cavell helped David Foster Wallace overcome the allure of philosophical logic, and allowed him to appreciate the artistic and moral powers of the improvisatory human voice. More persistently than Cavell, however, Wallace sought a broad account of our contemporary sociopolitical condition. This impulse led Wallace to take seriously the virtues of civic humanism—mature temperance, skilled knowledge, practical wisdom—that begins with Aristotle and descends to Dewey and Wallace’s own father, the philosopher James D. Wallace. Wallace’s fiction, however, allots little space for the civic virtues that most capture Wallace the essayist. Everywhere in Infinite Jest we see meaning reduced to matter, purposeful action reduced to compulsion, and when Wallace tries in The Pale King to give body to his highest words, he ends up—as one character in the text puts it—“talking like a civics class.”