July 31st saw literary collegiate types eagerly awaiting the release of The End of the Tour, the first screen portrayal of David Foster Wallace and surely a key juncture in the writer’s evolving mythology. Controversy has been brewing since the film entered production. Wallace’s estate condemned the film as being against the deceased writer’s wishes, implying the film to be a rapacious cash-grab attempting to capitalise on Wallace’s erumpent posthumous fame. Later, everyone seemed to go a bit pale and convulse when photographs of starring actor Jason Segel emerged online. Appearing visibly uncomfortable on set, wincing even, while wearing Wallacean spectacles, bandana, and flannel, the actor looked more in costume than in character. The film was looking to be a fantastic car crash of a film, a Diana for Post-Grads.

Yet as the release has come and past, its Sundance premiere and trailer had ushered plaudits for Segel’s sharp portrayal of the genius author. The LA Times has even hailed the movie as a “very David Foster Wallace kind of film”. It seems that Wallace has escaped the usually destructive impact of the mythologising Hollywood biopic, but why such a kerfuffle about the authenticity of this particular author’s portrayal?

Wallace’s is simply different. His 2008 suicide was such a shock, that the discussion of how to remember him has been painfully conflicted. The revelation that Wallace had kept his clinical depression a secret to all, bar his closest friends and family, was difficult to process; not only was Wallace an outgoing and fatuously-admired figure but his famous speech “This is Water” is perhaps the most thoughtful meditation on carpe diem of the last twenty years. His appeal to the public at large derived from the relation between his hyper-intellectual, deeply metaphysical writing, and his cool-as-a-cucumber quick-witted slacker public persona. No matter how intellectual and possibly pretentious the topic, he stayed self-aware and grounded (during one interview he remarked mid-response “I get to ramble on this answer because the question was very hard”) and was able to deliver astounding insight. Amusingly, Wallace described this exceptional ability to communicate as his “regular guy-ness”. Perhaps that semblance of normality is why Wallace had charmed so many and made him a near aspirational figure for certain twenty-somethings who wished to embody the sincerity Wallace propounded.

However, the kind of person that Wallace actually was is still ambiguous. Various memoirs and even a biography have provided insight into the various aspects of his personality, but the release of a film so soon after his death could irrevocably determine his still mercurial reputation, without the permission of his estate and loved ones. Former editor of Infinite Jest, Michael Pietsch, speaking on behalf of the Wallace Estate, has decried the film for this reason as well as how it disrespects Wallace’s own (hypothetical) wishes: “David would have howled the idea [of a film] out of the room had it been suggested while he was living, and the fact that it can go ahead because he’s dead makes me very, very sad,” he wrote. “Anyone who has read David’s writing knows how tormented he felt about being a public figure and his overwhelming anxiety about being on the wrong side of the screen. The existence of a mythification of this brief passage of his life strikes me as an affront to him and to people who love his writing.” Pietsch’s sentiments are correct on most accounts, but that final sentence comes across as terribly naïve: Wallace has been mythologised from the very beginning of his career and arguably Pietsch was pivotal in that. David Lipsky’s interview transcript with Wallace Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself forms the basis of The End of the Tour. In the book, Lipsky recounts how in the publicity campaign for Wallace’s Infinite Jest, the Pietsch-managed publisher Little, Brown had sent out a series of cryptic promotional postcards that eventually announced “David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest”. This then escalated into full page adverts that challenged readers to read the mammoth Infinite Jest and the hype translated the novel into a sensational bestseller.

Wallace’s reaction to this success was thoroughly conflicted. It’s quite apt for Wallace’s main fansite and, by extension, his devotees to go by the sobriquet “The Howling Fantods” Despite the obvious pun on “fan”, the phrase is one Wallace used to express deep unease or repulsion. Throughout Although Of Course he continually admits his pleasure at seeing his publisher make money and cautiously admits liking some aspects of the praise, however early on he turns to Lipsky, saying “you’re not a bad guy. But this stuff [the interview] is real bad for me, it makes me self-conscious. The more exposure I as a person get, the more it hurts me as a writer”.

Wallace’s last admission here is a succinct explanation of the double bind that is the literary celebrity in the 21st century. Social media has become such a vital part of mainstream media that dealing with it has become a necessary dance with death for any person of note. While actors have always coped with the cult of personality that has evolved to be referred to as one’s “brand”, treating it as a character type that they can determine themselves (Anna Kendrick uses twitter to show off her sense of humour while Emma Watson presents a more serious side, detailing her attention to Global Women’s Rights), writers struggle with the sudden jump to consistently presenting yourself to the world.

The difference with writers is that they themselves are not the product. With an actor, their face and body type play into the characters they play, while writers are the technicians behind the wizard- their face, personality, and arguably opinions inconsequential and separate to the printed word they produce. If a writer becomes bigger than their book, their readers will approach their work differently. In the aftermath of Wallace’s suicide, stories where he wrote about depression or suicidal characters were suddenly invested with more significance. DT Max did this extensively in his biography of Wallace, Every Love Story is A Ghost Story, with the story Good Old Neon.

However, in the modern media marketplace, having a face to a name is key, especially in the publishing business. In the New York Times bestseller list, television personalities and politicians dominate the non-fiction list and their lesser-spotted fiction-writing counterparts also make a significant splash, as happened with BJ Novak’s One More Thing last year. Being well-known has never hurt your sales, but the pressure of creating a successful media profile has always been dangerous to writers. Truman Capote’s devotion to his media profile may have heralded the landmark success of In Cold Blood but he never published anything after, continuing to maintain his celebrity through television appearances. While it was Capote’s decision to focus so much on that cultivation of personality, with the current demand for personality, that choice is no longer available.

Another great pressure of maintaining a competent profile is that any backfires that cause a negative perception spread far quicker and stay permanent. For example, emerging writer Tao Lin appears to have embraced social media with gusto, but not to always positive response. Lin’s forthright and self-publicising online persona alongside giving some aloof and plain bizarre interviews has peeved some internet users and their elephantine memories. While Lin may well be playing with the idea of a media profile, his reputation has already begun to precede his work. Even in positive reviews of his most recent novel Taipei, apologies were made regarding his divisive personality.

While Capote and Lin may have put themselves in knots attempting to catch the media’s glare, the most destructive and reductive mythologisers are us, dear readers. With the rise of social media, our focus on the authors as people instead of their work has been exacerbated. In her introduction to All Over Ireland, Deirdre Madden cites a concern over, “the state of reading”, with literary festivals hosting more Q&A’s with authors on their “process” than actual readings of the work that process bore. One of the reasons why writers seem so sceptical or openly terrified of literary celebrity is that they have no control over it, unlike their writing. No matter how many times a writer may draw attention towards their work, their public image begins to be trapped and subject to the whims of the public imagination. This has become manifest in blind idolatry.

While the idolatry of authors has always been around (Patti Smith used to wear “long grey raincoats” in tribute to her teenage icon Rimbaud), it has turned into a form of reductive totemising or “meme-ification”. The “fan club” approach of readers can be seen in certain devotees of the Lost Generation of ‘20’s Paris: wankers in gabardines that drink black coffee by day and weak wine by night, their knowledge of the fiction not going beyond Gatsby or The Sun Also Rises and overshadowed by trivia about who-fought-who and who-drank-how-much. This commemorative approach has become shockingly prevalent with the growth of the internet and its ability to host ever more dreamyhemingway.gifs from Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris. The painful thing is that a huge amount of energy is seemingly put into the curation of these tributes, that could have instead been used engaging with the writer’s actual work.

Ultimately, the saddest aspect of literary celebrity would be its essential falseness. There are always more and more biographies to be produced about a writer that tells a different story- with human lives nothing is truly definitive, nothing definitively authentic. Even Wallace’s sincerity, the foundation of his fame, is a reactive fabrication to that fame. The high-toned voice, the manicured yet precise rhythm of speech, the occasional self-aware comment to diffuse any pomposity, was an attempt to peel off the label of “Infinite Writer” given him by his publisher. From the opening pages of Although Of Course, you see Wallace first react to his interviewer by acting puerile, discussing whether the book’s success is going to “get [his] dick sucked”, before mellowing and engaging with Lipsky on a mano e mano level, initiating a strange dance where stances change but insights are continually shared between two humans on even ground.

Wallace was a very complex guy, his “regular guy-ness” being easily disputed if one peruses DT Max’s biography. His best friend during the latter half of his life, Jonathan Franzen, has said that “I remember this being a frequent topic of conversation, [Wallace’s] notion of not having an authentic self. Of being just quick enough to construct a pleasing self for whomever he was talking to. I see now he wasn’t just being funny — there was something genuinely compromised in David”. Wallace’s public persona was an incredibly successful attempt at constructing a “pleasing self”, the memory of which he has outlived. Franzen has always been clear to point out that Wallace wasn’t “St. Dave”, but it’s the saint that has captured the popular imagination, his post-mortem fame being built around this simplification. Fan art, blog posts, etc. all propagate and pay tribute, not only to a person they barely knew but have almost invented, expanding upon a media persona.

Literary celebrity is exactly that- a fan’s expansion of something outside the text- while there is a real person behind the curtain, they are largely an empty vessel to be filled by an active online community; death only allowing this creation to continue unchallenged. Perhaps the most accurate account we can hope to see of Wallace is the version portrayed by Segel in The End of the Tour, a Proteus trying to figure out his interrogator and present the most pleasing form.

While The End of the Tour has yet to receive an Irish Release date, you can pick up the book that inspired it – Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself by David Lipsky – from Easons for €17.99