There's an article on website The Awl right now called "The Dead Cannot Consent" which is a response to the Wallace estate's complaints about the making of this new DFW film. I was wondering what your thoughts are on the state of Wallace fans in general, given that their response to this movie is to actually decry the people who actually knew Wallace for speaking out against it?
Many people don’t know that JG Ballard trained as a physician.
There’s an early short story called The Drowned Giant. It was written shortly after his wife died while on vacation with her family, of a pneumonia that Spanish doctors were unable to cure. In this story, a 300 foot tall man washes up on the beach of an English resort town. 1964 was a fulcrum year. Ballard was disgusted by the medical profession and by himself. While his wife was still living, Ballard was bolted into a happiness that made his writing shallow. Her death thrust his three children on him in a way that made his compartment of self-satisfaction much too crowded any longer to soothe. After his wife’s death Ballard was thrown back on himself, where he nearly foundered.
The town’s inhabitants are at first awed by the presence of a man the size of a cathedral, lying drowned on a tidal flat. But the giant quite naturally becomes an object of tourism, and even of affection. Children dare one another to climb over his face, leap across the black well of his parted lips and curl up in the orbits of his cloudy eyes. Then, as the man begins to putrefy, his flesh is stripped from his bones and sold to factories where it will be rendered into cat food and fertilizer. His penis is dug out by the root on the orders of a theatrical promoter. The promoter has it skinned, dried, and loaded onto a truck where it follows a traveling circus, misadvertised as the member of a whale.
Whether you like it or not, whether you’re a fan or not, whether you’re tending some memorial flame or embroidering the edge of some disintegrating memory, whether you’re canning his posterity or wrapping death in chintz by referring to his suicide with despicable platitudes, if your connection to David Foster Wallace is personal in any way you will find yourself in the crowd that gathered on the beach in Ballard’s story. You are by turns deluded, callous, ghoulish, given to flabby eulogy, aroused by profit, paralyzed by glory, or worst of all, inebriated by intimacy.
The giant is dead, and though we will continue to gather around it to suck meaning from the corpse (we are helpless to do anything else), we will find that the flesh—flesh of the body or flesh of the spirit—can be sliced only so thin before its sections surrender to transparency and finally, nothingness.
And in the end, when only the ribs at low tide remain, when every exploitation has been undertaken and every last bubble of fruitless intimacy blown and burst, there will be what there always was—what there has always been in the face of death—the story.
