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The Divine Left: A Chronicle of the Years 1977–1984

sonal the literary-philosophical promise of our lives. ‘To take Wallace seriously as a thinker’, Baskin writes, ‘is to take seriously his fervent, perhaps even sometimes his embarrassing, commitment to the problems of the self’ (p. 142). And so, in Baskin’s reading, Wallace’s fiction illustrates how problems ‘customarily cordoned off into self-help’ (p. 142) have aspects that can and should be considered philosophically. Taking guidance from the later work of Stanley Cavell, Baskin reads The Pale King as a perfectionist text framing the development of the human soul not as a personal or a religious problem but as a standing concern for philosophy. It is to Baskin’s great credit that his chapter resists the temptation to sentimentalize or to paraphrase Wallace and to illuminate instead the distinctively philosophical purchase of his work. In any consideration of Wallace’s writing there is a consistent temptation to refer to the writer’s biography, to his lifelong struggles with anxiety and depression and to his tragic early death, by suicide, at the age of forty-six. Unfortunately, this biographical temptation can too often combine with the posthumous publication of ‘This is Water’ and The Pale King (arguably the pieces from the Wallace canon most easily mined for moralism or self-help), to foreground the writer’s personal struggles as fully inseparable from a proper appreciation of his work. The best essays of this new collection, as exemplified by Horn and Baskin, demonstrate that Wallace’s literary achievement can be deeply personal, and deeply philosophical, at one and the same time. At his very best Wallace resists the easy certainty of self-help for the detailed delineation of human struggle in life and in language. Thinking of the writer’s legacy in this way, we might say that Wallace’s work shows a very distinctive form for philosophical exploration to take, that Wallace’s creative legacy doesn’t count as but that it does count for philosophy.