David Foster Wallace, the Monk, and the Bridge Option
Also introducing the Holy Fool, Hume, and Punic Options
David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest is so quixotically massive and absurd, the average reader today could easier read Cervantes. I’m on my third try and continue to bog down in the book’s stylistic unorthodoxy and endless footnotes. If it weren’t for the book’s frequent chuckles that serve as oxygen shots to the brain, I would’ve suffocated before page 100.
At this point, I’m just trying to get through it. My chances of understanding it? About the same as Trump winning in November and not getting assassinated before 2028.
But a dude named “Edmund Waldstein” understands Wallace and that doorstop-of-a-book. He wrote a splendid essay about it at The Lamp.
Waldstein, it turns out, is also a Cistercian monk.
“For the love of Bernard!” I thought to myself as I read his essay about Wallace. “Why is a monk, wrapped in a premodernist monastic order, conversant in the work of a postmodernist author, especially one as irreverent as Wallace? Is he a cloistered deviant, sneaking copies of Wallace, Pynchon, and Eco into his room, reading them under the covers and hiding them during the day? But where would he hide those huge books in that sparsely furnished room? A Cistercian couldn’t effectively conceal a copy of Gravity’s Rainbow any more than a fat man could inconspicuously defecate in a travel bus bathroom.”
It was too improbable. I concluded that Waldstein must be reading postmodern literature with his superior’s blessing.
I’ve also concluded that Waldstein, a man of the Benedict Option, is also a man of the “Bridge Option.”
Premodernism and Postmodernism Have a Common Enemy: Modernity
Modernity is multifaceted, but its overriding theme is the rejection of all areas of reality that can’t be articulated, grasped, and controlled.1 Thomas Aquinas wrote,
The slenderest knowledge that may be obtained of the highest things is more desirable than the most certain knowledge obtained of lesser things.
The modernist writes,
The slenderest knowledge that may be obtained of the highest things is a dumb-ass waste of time.
You’ll notice the subtle difference.
Premodernity valued the highest things. Modernity rejected the higher things: their relevance, knowability, and even existence.
The modernist rejection won, championed by a parade of fools, starting with that schizophrenic Grand Marshal, Descartes, and including almost every major writer, thinker, and philosophical school from 1600 to 1900.
The problem with modernity, however, is simple: It’s dead-ass wrong. Its worldview depends on eliminating all considerations of the highest things. This, of course, is fine if there are no higher things, but if there are . . . well, you start encountering serious problems. Such an approach, to borrow a current term, isn’t sustainable.
The Rebels Against Modernity
Astute people throughout modernity tried to point out the problems. Blaise Pascal was there at the beginning, sounding the alarm bell. Fyodor Dostoyevsky was there 200 years later as the adverse effects were becoming increasingly obvious, whaling on the bell.
But they didn’t get far. Modernity and its unholy trinity—Rationalism, Empiricism, and Progressivism—got stronger and the problems that necessarily arise from an entire culture embracing a fundamentally flawed worldview grew more menacing.
In response, the past 150 years have given us a stream of counter-rejection movements: folks who hate modernity and rebel against it.
These counter-rejections take many forms, some edifying, some not; some beautiful, some terrifying; some sinfully fun, some seriously sinful.
Modernity championed rationality, so some forms of counter-rejection celebrate irrationality. For the religiously inclined, there’s the occult or maybe Zen and its koans. For the aesthetic, there’s absurdism. This might be called the “Holy Fool Option,” named after men who willingly took leave of their reason in service to something greater (and beyond) reason.
Modernity championed empiricism, so some forms of counter-rejection attack scientism and science’s inherent limitations. Some rebels point to science's long history of reversing its dogmas (for a series of instances in medicine, see this recent episode of Econtalk). Others point to the hubristic absurdity of effectively collecting and applying knowledge (Friedrich Hayek is an example of this form of rebellion2). Still others philosophically point to the problem of induction. I call this form of counter-rejection the “Hume Option,”
Modernity championed material progress, so some forms of counter-rejection embrace intentional poverty and austerity, like living off the grid (the “Benedict Option” taps into this vein).
A few anti-modernists have sought to raze modernity: churn the ground, upheave foundations, and throw salt everywhere: the “Punic Option,” named after Rome’s destruction of Carthage. Nietzsche was a pioneer.
Some other anti-modernists look for guidance from eras that predate modernity. This is the Bridge Option: spanning backward over the centuries to build a bridge over the molten sea of modernity to connect premodernity and postmodernity.
Such, I suspect, is the approach of that David Foster Wallace monk. He’s steeped in postmodernist literature, living in accord with a rule of life developed in the 12th century. He’s a graduate of Thomas Aquinas College, which is a classical Great Books school, but he understands postmodernist literature. He rejects modernism with his vocation; he rejects it with his avocation.
David Foster Wallace: Postmodernist Pascal
What does this monk conclude about David Foster Wallace?
He concludes that Wallace is the twentieth century’s Blaise Pascal.
Pascal simultaneously recoiled from his day's two cutting-edge intellectual currents: Montaigne’s blanket skepticism and Descartes’ rationalism. Pascal responded with a celebration of the irrational (the heart has its reasons) and the need for humility in light of the enormous mystery that is existence (everything on the other side of the door that Aldous Huxley wanted to get beyond).
Wallace, according to the monk, recoiled from the same two intellectual currents: skepticism and rationalism, but by the late twentieth century, they had grown into postmodern skepticism and scientific rationalism. Wallace, the monk tells us, rebelled against this “hypermodernity.”
To combat modernity, Wallace and Pascal resorted to the sacred (one of those higher things that modernity rejected).
Pascal’s respect and defense of the sacred is well-known. Wallace’s, not so much, but “worship” appears in many key passages of Wallace’s work. Wallace knew that in order to escape hypermodernity, we needed to find something sacred. Wallace seemed to have a rather immanent (earthly) understanding of the sacred, something he called “the sub-surface unity of all things,” but it was a sense of the sacred nonetheless. It’s what gives Wallace’s work such absorbing interest.
Wallace and Kerouac
It all reminds me of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road.
Readers of that book focus on Kerouac’s “kicks,” especially the drugs and sex, but that’s not what the book was about. That’s not even what Kerouac was about. If drugs and sex were the point, Kerouac’s writings wouldn’t have been a source of such absorbing interest over the past 70 years and On the Road wouldn’t have been the leitmotif of Judd Apatow’s excellent Freaks and Geeks.
On the Road is about the sacred: the need to worship, to find the Beatific Vision (“It!”) away from the conventionalities of modern life.
Likewise, the monk assures us, Wallace’s work is about the sacred. We can focus on the dissonance of Wallace’s prose — the paragraphs that continue for pages, the unique punctuation — but that would be like focusing on Kerouac’s form of dissonance — the drugs and sex — and not realizing Kerouac was tearing at the conventionalities of modernity in order to reach something deeper: the sacred.
I’m not sure Wallace or Kerouac ever found the sacred, but they were trying.
And for that, they deserve respect and attention.
I think my monk friend would agree.
I lump all such areas under the term “the Tao.”
And that’s just in the area of socio-economics. We’ve also known for a hundred years that even the most fundamental aspects of physical reality are inherently uncertain. E.g., Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle.