I read some Baudrillard when I was in my teens. All the cool kids were reading him, and I am a fashion victim. I have by now erased most of his vague, unsubtle theorizing from my memory, but some insights have stayed with me. One of them reads like this:

We used to live in the internal imaginary world of the mirror, of the divided self and of the stage, of otherness and internal alienation. Today we live in the imaginary world of the screen, of the internal interface and the reduplication of contiguity and internal networks. All our machines are screens. We too have become screens, and the interactivity of men has become the interactivity of screens.

The imaginary world of the mirror: The insurmountable gap between the true self and its representations, interior or exterior. The face always hidden behind the stage mask; or, as the doctor tells the actress in Bergman's Persona:

I understand, all right. The hopeless dream of being - not seeming, but being. At every waking moment, alert. The gulf between what you are with others and what you are alone. The vertigo and the constant hunger to be exposed, to be seen through, perhaps even wiped out. Every inflection and every gesture a lie, every smile a grimace. Suicide? No, too vulgar. But you can refuse to move, refuse to talk, so that you don't have to lie. You can shut yourself in. Then you needn't play any parts or make wrong gestures. Or so you thought. But reality is diabolical. Your hiding place isn't watertight. Life trickles in from the outside, and you're forced to react. No one asks if it is true or false, if you're genuine or just a sham. Such things matter only in the theatre, and hardly there either. I understand why you don't speak, why you don't move, why you've created a part for yourself out of apathy. I understand. I admire. You should go on with this part until it is played out, until it loses interest for you. Then you can leave it, just as you've left your other parts one by one.

Even the actress's desperate gesture, shutting in so as not to be unfaithful to her true self, fails: Life forces you to react, and this shutting in is itself a role she chooses to play.

We are, Baudrillard argues, beyond that, however. Theory has made us wary of such "true faces", immanent and preceding any enactment, beyond the grasp of language. This suspicion eventually became widespread, or at least so it seems looking from here. We have not, however, learned to live with the thought that "such things matter only in the theatre, and hardly there either". And this is where we can depart from Baudrillard, in claiming that the world of the screen is still a world of otherness and internal alienation. The content of the screen is even more artificial and derivative than that of the mirror and the stage persona; the key difference is that the former does not, like the latter two, establish an overt tension between the authentic and the artificial, the source and the derivation. A source is still assumed, but it's not next to the mirror or behind the mask: the source of the image on the screen is remote, perhaps impossible to reach or to trace. When one identifies with the screen and the logic of the screen, knowledge of the true self is precluded from the start. It is there somewhere, but if your quest is to find it, you are screwed.

Wallace's characters are all, in his own words, emotionally retarded. They are often very intelligent people, clever enough to learn the norms and expectations of the world around them, develop a keen sense of appropriateness, figure out what they have to say or do to get the desired response. What they haven't done is attributing meaning to any of this; creating an identity for themselves; to thine own self being true. They are hollow men, dettached from themselves. They have never taken even the first step in "that most German of journeys", that of character formation.

But matters are even worse: In Wallace's world, this step is unthinkable. His characters are all suffering, but of a diffuse pain they cannot articulate (even when it's obvious to the reader where it's coming from); they aren't mature enough even to acknowledge it, until it comes to overwhelm them completely - a situation Wallace mistakenly labels "Psychotic Depression". Their first route of escape is dealing with pain beneath language and articulation, by falling into addiction - usually to chemicals or alcohol, but Wallace neatly catalogues the wide range of possibilities.

Not that his characters never set a search for sincerity and authenticity, like in Good Old Neon and The Depressed Person (short stories). The former shows a character finding that every gesture of his is a lie, and, unable to find anything authentic, finally kills himself (Wallace by the end explains that the story consists of projections of the author - by which he is very unambiguous about being himself, not some fictional author - upon reading about a similar suicide on the news). Good Old Neon searches outward; The Depressed Person moves inwards, in a spiral of self-denouncement of artifice that never really comes anywhere closer to the sincerity it seeks, but replicates the same artifice endlessly.

The other choice - a better one, one that might actually work - is the approach of the Alcoholics Anonymous (AA). When Wallace's characters finally get a glimpse inwards, what they see is allegorized by deformed children; something helpless and revolting, both undeveloped and malformed. Wallace's AA is a strategy of infantilization, of coming to terms with oneself by reducing oneself to one's lowest, most primitive mode of function: Of abandoning pride and becoming this deformed child they ultimately recognize is their present state. The alternative to indulging in vice, in Wallace's world, is radical self-indulgence.

Wallace is often contrasted to writers such as Palahniuk, for the former's advantage (!). It is true, of course, that Wallace is a much more skillful writer; but when we contrast the works beyond form, we see that Fight Club starts where Infinite Jest leaves us: Tyler Durden is also a very successful emotional retard, suffering from extreme discontentment he can't even begin to articulate. He is more advanced than Wallace's typical character (let's take Hal Incandenza here) in that at least he is aware of how his identity has become loose, indistinct and fragmentary. In the beginning of the story, Tyler tries the support groups Wallace so unabashedly eulogizes; eventually he finds, however, that such groups are even a greater travesty than everything else he tried, and a self-degrading one at that. True, the alternative he finds - an aggressive revolt against the world, directed as diffusely as his sense of discontentment - is not the most well-rounded of attitudes. But there is more hope in the world of Fight Club than in that of Infinite Jest, for in the world of Fight Club, however misguided the results of this might be, the notion of human dignity still lives. There is also a bit more self-knowledge there, but one that is crucial.

It is wrong to speculate on the private thoughts of a writer by his books, and very disrepectful when he has just killed himself. But Wallace's narrators, his narrative voices, never seem to look at this dispairing world exactly from above; they alternate perspective and participation. His defense of the infantilizing AA - something which, on the terms he describes it, cannot possibly be a satisfactory solution to anyone - is too excited not to sound sincere, even if the story itself casts its doubts. His characters often speak of "self-consciousness", a sensation that is actually one of the clearest symptoms of self-oblivion and absence of character, the anxiety when the screen is accused of being a screen but there is nothing other than the screen, and one would like to continue living in the travesty of the screen rather than ever probing this revealed abyss. Fair enough; but they speak of it full of vanity, a defense mechanism that tries to turn a horrendous deficiency into some sort of advantage (it's better to suffer from self-consciousness than not being self-conscious at all, right? We are suffering from the burden of qualities here.); and Wallace seems all too often to validate this vanity, even though the stories themselves always end up making it clear that what they call "self-consciousness" would be properly called "self-oblivion". The internal alienation Baudrillard supposed we had left behind in the world of the mirror.

This contribution might come off as lofty, pointing to the failure in Wallace's work even to articulate the problem of character, the telling impossibility of growing up in the worlds he described, the naivety and, let's face it, dishonesty that are pervasive in all his books - as though I had myself an answer to all this, knew how to chase away the ghosts that haunt all his characters. But truth is I don't. I think the abysses are all actually there.

It is terrible that we lost him. I spoke disparagingly of him, and of how he seemed to be getting worse rather than better over time; of how his grip on the Zeitgeist seemed to have become loose, how Infinite Jest already read like a book of the past, and the recent short stories were still back there. But I was looking forward to his next (big) novel. He was one of our most inventive writers, a master whose tours de force were downright humiliating; there are very few writers working today that I enjoy more than Wallace.

Also, I struggled over Infinite Jest during difficult times, and his books strung chords I was not hearing quite anywhere else. Becoming a fan of Wallace was important to me, and the process of growing over it was the obvious continuation. Through his works, he played the part of a friend, of sorts. And it is sad to see a friend go.