David Foster Wallace: American Culture | Video Lecture Series (2/2)

David Foster Wallace: Depression, Irony and Humor.

In this installment of our video lecture series on David Foster Wallace, the author reflects on American culture.

Taken from an interview clip featuring the late Wallace, this video serves as an audiovisual supplement to the original.

An excerpt from the interview:

"I know that there is, at least in America, an entire class of, and now, I'm talking about a very specific class here, I'm talking about upper and upper-middle-class kids whose parents could afford to send them to very good schools where they got very good educations, who are often working in jobs that are financially rewarding, but don't have anything to do with what they got persuasively taught was important and worthwhile in school.

The easiest way to talk about it would be that for the upper-middle class in the US, particularly younger people, things are often, materially, very comfortable. And there's also often a great sadness and emptiness. There's a particular ethos in U.S. culture, especially in entertainment and marketing culture. That very much appeals to people as individuals, that you don't have to be devoted or subservient to anything else.

There is no larger good than your own good and your own happiness.
That the root in English of addict is the Latin, "addicere", which means religious devotion. It was an attribute of beginning monks, I think. We all worship and we all have a religious impulse. We can choose to an extent what we worship, but the myth that we worship nothing and give ourselves away to nothing simply sets us up to give ourselves away to something different.

For instance, pleasure or drugs. or the idea of having a lot of money and being able to buy nice stuff or in the tennis academy, it's somewhat different. It's devotion to an athletic pursuit that requires a certain amount of sacrifice and discipline, but is nevertheless an individual sport and one is trying to get ahead as an individual. I think, with an American idea, and not a universal one, but one that I think kids get exposed to very early. That you are the most important and what you want is the most important and that your job in life is to gratify your own desires. That's a little crude to say it that way, but in fact it's something of the ideology here. And it's certainly the ideology that's perpetrated by television and advertising and entertainment and the economy thrives on it.

This is one enormous engine and temple of self-gratification and self-advancement. And in some ways it works very very well. In other ways, it doesn't work all that well, because, at least for me, it seems as if there are whole other parts of me that need to worry about things larger than me that don't get nourished in that system.

Language like that, the wounded inner child, the inner pain is part of a kind of pop psychological movement in the United States that is a sort of popular Freudianism that has its own paradox which is that the more we are taught to list and resent the things of which we were deprived as children, the more we live in that anger and frustration and the more we remain children.

That's a very simple way of putting it, but I think the character in that story is sort of a compendium of kind of all the worst and most painful features of the popular psychology movement in the U.S.
To the extent that I understand it, being what you call "grown-up" isn't a lot of fun a lot of the time. There are things you have to do. There are things you want to do, that you can't do for a variety of reasons. I think, for young people in America there are very mixed messages from the culture.

There's a streak of moralism in American life that extols the virtues of being grown up and having a family and being a responsible citizen, but there's also the sense of do what you want, gratify your appetites, because when I'm a corporation, appealing to the parts of you that are selfish and self-centered and want to have fun all the time is the best way to sell you things.

American economic and cultural systems that work very well in terms of selling people products and keeping the economy thriving, do not work as well when it comes to educating children or helping us help each other know how to live and be happy. If that word means anything.

Clearly it means something different from whatever I want to do. I want to take this cup and throw it right now. I have every right to. I should. We see it with children. That's not happiness. That feeling of having to obey every impulse and gratify every desire. It seems to me to be a strange kind of slavery."

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