The New Statesman has an interesting article about David Foster Wallace in light of his suicide. For various reasons, lately I've become more interested in Wallace, even though I have read only a smattering of his work. I am too impatient to enjoy his longer-form writing, as virtuosic as it clearly is. I acknowledge its worth, I just can't relate to it yet--this is probably a lack in me, not in him. Please indulge me as I try to work my thoughts out a bit; if you are a fan, I mean no disrespect either to him, or to your affection.
Something in the New Statesman article explains my basic concern with Wallace:
And what is "that kind of genius"? Can one be a genius in any artistic form while remaining largely unconcerned with "ideas of audience"? I'd argue not. In the young artist, art is flashy instances of still-shifting craft in the service of raw self-expression; it is energetic, exciting even, but very rarely genius. In the mature artist, the now-internalized craft disappears and communication becomes paramount. Older artists can communicate in a much deeper and more effective way, because the accumulation of experience encourages them to acknowledge "the idea of audience." When you're a young writer, all you know is you.
"[a chunk of DFW, then the author says:]
This is writing of extraordinary syntactic control, and it is characteristic of what Eggers describes as Wallace's "dense, discursive, and insanely detailed style". The sentence continues for almost another page; the paragraph in which it occurs runs over four pages. Eggers says that he asked Wallace to consider breaking up some of the paragraphs before the story was published: "It was as if he were visiting the notion . . . for the first time. He was that kind of genius, whose understanding of the workings of his own fiction was, I think, largely separate from ideas of audience."
Unfortunately, our current culture recognizes young talent much more readily--and so genius has become equated with what young artists do. This prejudice is blatantly commercial; the biz needs a steady stream of "geniuses" young enough to be molded into saleable forms, to keep their Satanic mills going. Thus Wallace became "the next Pynchon." Fact is, the amount of renown Wallace got, at the age he got it, probably retarded his authentic artistic progress. The morbid self-consciousness, the surfeit of ideas, the complex sentences which belie a need to dominate the reader by demanding lots of time and close attention...Without the need to maintain a brand, all of these might've melted away. Maybe they were doing so, I'll read more and see.
IMO, Wallace would've become a genius precisely to the degree to which he yoked "the workings of his own fiction" to "ideas of audience." To do otherwise is to introduce a imprecision of communication that is intolerable. Non-audience-focused writing may sell, it may even inspire, but this is luck; and master craftspeople replace luck with skill. That's what makes them master craftspeople--the desire to make every word, image, page, thought count. I look at "Infinite Jest" and see a solid week of my life; that is a bar few books can clear. The desire for concision in one's own writing is a reflection of the depth of one's knowledge of mortality. As a writer, you steal people's time, and it's immoral to steal more than you absolutely need. I don't trust Wallace to play by those rules.
But going ga-ga over Wallace's style is flawed in a more important way: In our current time-crunched era, when audiences are hopelessly fragmented, and mass culture so dominated by more efficient visual media that reading fiction seems to be deteriorating into a lifestyle choice--an upward thrust by strivers, a la playing chess or listening to Gilbert and Sullivan--in this time, is a "dense, discursive, and insanely detailed style" something to be celebrated? He came by it honestly, raised by an English teacher--but isn't such a style the linguistic version of bad prep school food or a Italian sportscar that's always in the shop, a kind of conspicuous consumption? The sales advantages of a "big serious book" aside, isn't writing 1000 pages when 500 would do a weakness, an unwillingness to do the hardest work of all--to choose, to commit?
When I read Wallace--and like I say, I need to read more--I feel a lot of hedging. "How am I coming off? Am I authentic, or just fooling myself? How do I hide?" Such are the common calculations among white, moneyed, intensely educated and oververbal Americans, the people who bought Wallace's work, edited it, packaged it, and above all claimed it as their worldview. Careful people aware of just how complicated and difficult the world is. But, dear friends, most of this thinking is neurotic bullshit. Certainly such calculations are the enemy of genius, and it would've been great to see if Wallace could've unshackled himself from all of it, as he aged and got more comfortable in his own skin.
When I read Wallace, I feel someone so self-conscious and uncertain, so fundamentally afraid of making the wrong selection, that he refuses to choose and tries to dazzle me with more words, more ideas, more conceits. This self-doubt, denial of responsibility, confusion about what art is or should be (which of course is a confusion about what being an adult is or should be) is completely in tune with Wallace's (and my) generation: overeducated, underemployed, loathe to commit, prone to apocalyptic despair, wanting to dazzle but fundamentally disenfranchised from themselves and the opportunity of being alive--a generation so unsure of what is worthwhile and what is not, and so terrified of being wrong about that, that they have as a group, quailed at the jump. We have frozen ourselves at the moment at which the culture focused its greatest attention on us, at the 16-24 demographic, yet the years pass. Every photo I ever saw of Wallace makes him look like a junior in college.
We all know the type: What does it mean when you are 35 and still wearing ironic t-shirts? Comic books; Seventies-worship; trivia about Saturday-morning cartoons--how sad it is to have "stopped" at age 20, not because there's anything inherently wrong with comics or the Seventies, but because nothing since has really grabbed our attention. Tom Wolfe's trademark is white three-piece suits; Wallace's was a bandanna--to deny that there's a difference is to deny any meaning in either choice. I'd argue that the choice Wallace made was to remain a talented undergraduate, dazzling with raw talent, brain buzzing with words. The tragedy of his death is that it seems like he was trying to move on; he was no longer quailing at the jump. This is my sense; I will leave it to more knowledgeable people to confirm.
Wallace believed that each of us is "sort of marooned" inside our own skull, and that it is fiction's job to "aggravate this sense of entrapment and loneliness and death in people". It was the estranging apparatus of his style - the postmodern rhetorical devices, the hyperextended sentences - that was meant to do the aggravating.
That, at least, was the theory. However, Wallace was tormented by the thought that the “antagonistic elements” in his fiction might in fact just be manifestations of a pathological exhibitionism.
The pathological exhibitionism of, say, a talented 20-year-old.
Why fiction needs to underscore the estranging, aggravating facet of existence I cannot say. If indeed the ground rules of existence are that we are all "sort of marooned" there is no great need for fiction to remind us of it--unless fiction is simply a formalistic exercise in translation of existence into ink-on-paper. Obviously every writer must choose what writing is for, and Wallace's choice says more to me about his mental state--the chemical drizzle he languished under--than about art or fiction or what our world needs from writers. I felt the depression in his writing before I knew he was depressed, and felt the suicide gathering in his body every time I read his work. A human mind--even one as capacious as Wallace's--is a finite place, and without sources of joy outside of its own machinations, what other outcome can there be but self-destruction? There is something adolescent about suicide, and without denigrating Wallace's great suffering, the chemical background of which is obvious, his end strikes me as consonant with that talented 20-year-old. I suspect his ill-fated attempt to go off Nardil (which I believe he started in college?) was an attempt to grow up, move on. That was one hell of a courageous choice, and I wish for him--not his books, which can and will take care of themselves--that he could've caught a break.
This highly developed generational self-consciousness is one reason Wallace was held in such esteem by his peers: he held up a mirror to their own anxieties, and articulated them more clearly and honestly than they ever dared.
And having said that, let's ask: was this a good thing? I suspect that a "highly developed generational self-consciousness" is primarily an artifact of modern consumer culture--one seldom reads of "the Civil War generation," for example, even though the experience of that conflict had, I would argue, a bit more impact than say, Saturday morning cartoons. I'm kidding, but only just; this slicing of experience into cohorts is a false operation, and the alliance formed by shared recall of "H.R. Pufnstuff" only feels substantial if the culture keeps insisting that's all you've got. As artists, we needn't be content to merely reflect this impoverished heritage, we can actually call bullshit and start determining what's really worth our attention. Art isn't sliced into generations; that's marketing.
Liking David Foster Wallace appears to be one of those markers; you're a certain type of person, you read DFW. But this ability to call up touchstones is a minor skill magnified by how books are packaged and sold; like Fitzgerald, Wallace strikes me as a talent on its way to genius, and probably not helped by the weight of our goofy generation. Wallace's popularity--which of course is minuscule next to the popularity achieved by mediocre television or a reasonably competent superhero movie--always seemed to me to be based on the scratching of a very specific itch. Reading Wallace--or McSweeney's, or comic books about serious subjects, all that pre-9/11 cultural boomlet that promised to loosen up literature but just made it snobby in a slightly different way--satisfies the intellectual jones of the underemployed post-collegiate. It soothes that lingering sad throb so many of us feel after we transit from the word-drenched intellectual world of University into the less stimulating (and perhaps less comfortable) texture of adulthood. I'm sure smarter people than I have correlated the rise of postmodern fiction with the lengthening and specialization of higher education; I'm not talking just about fiction MFA programs, but simply education in general. Wallace may be sudoku for liberal arts grads, and that's perfectly acceptable--but to equate that with "genius" shows just how narrow a space words-on-paper have come to occupy in our culture. Being dubbed "the voice of a generation" is, in the end, a limiting thing. It's a shame we won't see what he would've done after the mantle had passed, the glare had died down and he could really get down to more work.
Before I finish, I want to be clear: everything I've written above says more about me than David Foster Wallace. My thoughts about him continue to evolve, and as I read more, and think more, and hear more opinions, I reserve the right to deem anything I've written here as complete self-indulgent bullshit. But then again, this is a blog, and complete self-indulgent bullshit is what blogs are for.
See, now I'm hedging, too. But more important than all that: everything I've read about David Foster Wallace suggests that he was a genuinely decent, genuinely talented, kind human being who lived under circumstances ranging from difficult to truly tormented. That is the achievement we should celebrate--to be decent and helpful and give of yourself, who does that in this world? Damn few people, especially in the literary scene he occupied. That he accomplished what he did under his chemical/emotional circumstances is heroic; and whether or not he took his audience into account as much as my aesthetics would wish him to, an audience sought out and loved his work. Maybe I share that connection, maybe not, but I don't forget that the connection is the essential thing, and everything else, including this post, is blather. I do think, however, that his success--his lionization--owes much to the narcissism and flaws of my generation and the literary scene we've created, and I wonder that if he'd been a little less celebrated he might have been a bit more content. Success, like failure--talent, like madness--can lead one to destruction, and I cannot help but wonder whether precisely the things that his audience so related to--the anxieties mentioned above--kept him from healing personally. What makes it to the page is but a vapor of the true emotion; if a reader gets a whiff of painful self-consciousness, for example, you can be sure that the author felt it in every cell. When I read Wallace, I sense a mind desperate for diversion from an existence he's not sure is really worth the effort. I respect this struggle--shit, I relate to it. And because of that, I think we owe him what we owe all our honored dead: to live, not in perpetual self-doubt or compulsive analysis, or (shudder) with ironic distance, but fully and truly and well.
P.S.--I let my wife Kate, a passionate fan of DFW, read this before posting it. Her comments were very interesting, and I'm posting this after extracting a promise that she will write in and set me straight.
Twitter Updates
Written by | Edit this Post
Topics: