Four Unfinished Novels of David Foster Wallace
Dimitri Gríeljnk died by defenestration in a riot caused by the performance of his translation of Aeschylus’ Persians at the 1912 Pan-Slavo-Balkan Conference in Ljubljan...
Dimitri Gríeljnk died by defenestration in a riot caused by the performance of his translation of Aeschylus’ Persians at the 1912 Pan-Slavo-Balkan Conference in Ljubljana, a forgotten death of a forgotten man at a forgotten event that was, like most violence inspired by literary translation, the beginning of something world historically horrible: thirty years of war in Europe.1 A long, late-night monologue about Gríeljnk’s death by a Serbian bartender serves as the centerpiece to David Foster Wallace’s unwritten novel How Foul and Foolish, a bildungsroman—without footnotes or endnotes—about a young American named Michael Blish, who puts off college to travel former Yugoslavia in the aftermath of the Dayton Agreement.
Hans Wittgenstein disappeared in the Chesapeake Bay, 1902. Arthur Cravan disappeared off the Pacific coast of Mexico, 1918. Glenn Miller disappeared over the English channel, 1944. Detective and boat captain Nigel Concern sets out alone to solve the mysteries of these disappearances—of the philosopher’s brother, the dadaist boxer & poet, and the swing band leader—in the maritime detective novel Concern’s Concerns, Wallace’s only unwritten attempt at genre fiction. Upon finishing it, any reader is convinced that Concern has solved at least one of the cases, but cannot say which one. And while outwardly following the conventions of a detective novel, albeit set at sea, the book, read closely, reveals itself to be a series of cleverly hidden treatises on nautical knot tying, maritime law, and the futility of “land life”.
Hold, a companion to Concern’s Concerns and homage to Melville’s Mardi, follows the plot of Concern’s Concerns but in the form of philosophical monologues by Nigel Concern’s ship, the Sea’s Good Lady. A short, experimental failure.
The River tells the story of David, a writer who travels to southeastern Kentucky to spend a summer reporting on the preaching and hymnody of an Old Regular Baptist church. David falls in love to the matter of fact faith and kindness of the congregation, which he sees as an antidote to his own abstract intellectualizing and irony, and never leaves. He quits his teaching job in California, throws away his cell phone, and moves in with a local family. But even as he enters the water at his baptism he’s wrought by doubt about his own sincerity and if he really believes in God or just wants an escape from the psycho-socio-technological problems of modern America, a self-consciousness that makes him hold back from the sort of loud, spontaneous worship he sees around him every Sunday. But so then his tortured private analysis is cut short by what he must do in the aftermath of tornadoes leveling half of the town. The first half of the novel is replete with musicological notes on lined-out hymnody and asides on the history of Southern agrarianism, but all of that falls away as it goes on. It ends with a worried writer friend who’d traveled to check on him walking into the church to find David preaching and singing at the funeral of the church elder who baptized him.
Let’s note, though Wallace does not, the uncanny similarity of Gríeljnk’s death and subsequent three decades of bloodletting to the famous Prague defenestration of 1618.