Sunday, April 17, 2011

Excellent post by Alex over the 90s/00s’ blog on David Foster Wallace.

To be honest the post and the comments after it don’t leave me an awful lot to say. I will say however that I’m a Wallace sceptic. I remember Infinite Jest coming out and the moderate interest and mixed reviews it garnered at the time, the follow up Brief Interviews got generally (and I think rightly) negative reviews. So circa 2003 the general feeling re Wallace was: occasionally interesting, a bit over-blown, a bit try-hard, a bit contrived, not that great.

By the time Infinite Jest came out I was burned out on very long American post-modern novels anyway, having read the entire output or John Barth, Robert Coover and William Gaddis over the previous five or six years, plus as much as I could get by John Hawkes, Barthelme, William Gas, and the newer wave of post modernists like William Vollman, T.C Boyle and numerous others whose names escape me. I was an absolute beast for fiction the 90s and went straight from Moby Dick into Sutree and on into Carpenter’s Gothic without a pause.

So when Wallace turned up I was ready to get involved but, to be honest, it felt a bit stale. I got some way into Infinite Jest, some way into The Broom of the System, liked some of the essays in A Supposedly Fun Thing and almost nothing in Brief Interviews. Given that I was unenthusiastic it’s hard for me to say anything very specific except that the kind of suburban affluent melancholy of the privileged geeky yet cool clued-up pop-culture polymath seemed heavily symptomatic of the 90’s and rather over-subscribed to.

Actually it felt at the time as though several writers were jockeying for position as Great American Novelist, which inevitably, during the post Historical, a-political, Information Age largely meant obtuse/elliptical indirect free style dense with asides and references to everything from astrophysics to Bugs Bunny cartoons. This was felt to be the main aim of the novel, to bring the Information, but with a protective coating of irony and a diffuse melancholy so that the author couldn’t exactly be seen as having no real critical position on the times. James Woods memorably and rightly savaged all this in an essay in which he coined the term hysteric realism but Woods' own solution to the impasse, a non hysteric, more orthodox realism, is trying to get the genie back in the bottle to a large degree. Certain conventions of literary self-consciousness developed and took hold after the War and they can’t just be wished away now.

My expectation during the mid-Nineties was that some of the innovations of the experimental end of post war Fiction (largely The American Post modern novel, the Nouveau Roman, certain elements of the South American Boom, Calvino, Borges etc) would be redeployed and extended on in a critical or committed vein. The political ravages of the previous ten to fifteen years seemed so concrete, real and immediate to me that I simply couldn’t believe that there wasn’t a wave of angry, dissenting radical literary avant-gardists out there ready to burn the past, kill their idols and forge something new. Naturally I considered myself one of them.


Instead we got The Beach, Purple America, Infinite Jest, White Teeth, all of which felt thoroughly inconsequential. In retrospect Fight Club was probably about the best of it.


So I think there’s basically a lot more to dislike in Wallace than to like and you’ll forgive me if I don’t find This Is Water** to be very significant, it’s a set of observations that any reasonably thoughtful person knows by the time they’re in their mid teens, my feeling is it’s become a touchstone because it’s the smartest guy in the room whose saying it, so, wow, it must have depth***. It’s interesting to see the Wallace industry kicking into gear though and granting the status of savant/seer to him and doubtless glossing the general indifference toward his work at the time. Something similar has happened to Joy Divison over my lifetime too, when I was a teenager they were just a bunch of not very exciting miserabilist from Manchester, now they seem to have had some quasi-religious cult built around them, no doubt the same will apply to Wallace and I have an odd feeling that’s the last thing he would have wanted. I think he would have preferred to be rejected, spurned and surpassed, I think he would like to have been recognized as the problem, I think he would like to have been approached sceptically and critically and I say that because I certainly don’t doubt his integrity.



*Writing that I suddenly felt nostalgic for my own enthusiasm for fiction around the time, I really read continuously ( I did as a kid too, I remember actually walking and reading at the same time.) There were several reasons for this which I won’t elaborate on here, but certainly one of them was escape. There’s a passage early on in Sophie’s Choice where the narrator talks about the sheer physical thrill of encountering finely wrought prose, it practically gives him an erection. I understand that. When you’re living in poverty both financial and existential then the semi- erotic transport of the beautifully written is an addictive necessity.



**The fact that that speech is now called “This is water” is symptomatic of the arch- bereftness of so much of the work of the period, the straining after something meaningfully indirect yet not typically literary produces just this kind of smug, slightly irritable, shallow posturing.


*** Plus why on that website Alex links to is there thought to be some kind of opposition between being smart and being kind, and the notion that there shouldn’t be/isn’t is radical or surprising. I know I’ve said it before but I’ll say it again, the aim of maturity is the development of a political position and a praxis, this is, if you like, the synthesis of this supposed opposition of smart/kind, politics is the lived expression of your intellectual and moral capacity, politics is what Wallace and Smith etc lacked (and hence the faintly tragic, brittle, frustrated air). I’m slighty obsessed with the notion of the “by-product” at the moment, and literature is a by-product of something else, a commitment not to literature itself but to some larger and broader idea literature wants to serve. If you aim directly at it you’ll never hit it, but you’ll never understand why. Literature has to extend out of a full life, it can't be a proxy for one.

10 comments:

Alex Niven said...

- "the aim of maturity is the development of a political position and a praxis, this is, if you like, the synthesis of this supposed opposition of smart/kind, politics is the lived expression of your intellectual and moral capacity, politics is what Wallace and Smith etc lacked ..."

Couldn't agree more.

I suppose, to reiterate the final point of the original post, it's the Dickensian-sentimental side of Wallace that I think does mean he stands out from the Eggers-Smith crowd. I see a good deal of pathos in the fact that Wallace seemed to get so close to the synthesis Dickens achieved between humanism in the novel and a radical critique of liberalism, but finally didn't quite manage to reach a position of political praxis. And I think this is the point where he should be "rejected, spurned, and surpassed", as you put it. He created a blueprint that needs to be realised much more fully and less stoically-individually.

That said, in Infinite Jest, he does try to explore a very microcosmic (I suppose very American) kind of religious communitarianism - the AA-type "Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House", which is I suppose another version of the Fight Club meme, but without the dystopian element. It could just be my naivete, but I find something of the "literature extending out of a full life" in this attempt to build a novel around a community of suffering ordinary people. And the contrast with the bratty bourgeois kids of the tennis academy is surely significant.

Though again there's the stoical individual superman figure in the Don Gately character, who tellingly ends up dying/sacrificing himself at the end ...

How can we get our hands on your fiction btw Carl? Looks intriguing stuff.

carl said...

maybe i'll give Infinte Jest another go at some point...it is strangely tough read tho...i mean i found it much harder to engage with than even the Recognitions or Omensetters' Luck...or i should say that early on it didn't feel worth the demand it was going to make on my time and so i was fighting myself all the way....( same with De-Lillo's Underworld)

wheras i was absolutely committed to reading every word on every page of Giles Goat-Boy etc...

again, thinking back i was incredibly disciplined in my reading in my twenties, the idea of skipping forward in a novel/skipping sections offended me deeply...

i read less but still fairly enthusiatically in my early thirties ie Tournier, Cortazar, etc

last five years i've read virtually nothing... case in point i brought a load of books to japan with me... only two are novels the City and the City and Spook Country and i've read about fifty pages of both before abandoning them....I'm sure they're both very good but they just feel like two more smart/solid books...

we really need to take advantage of cheap p.o.d stuff and the pdfing possibilties of the internet and start pumping stuff out, wilder, less well-made stuff, more adventurous/unorthodox things,generate a converstion at least....

see i guess the problem is that generally literary people are a bit boring and narrow-minded and
have quite fixed ideas about how a novel should be...so even though i consider myself primarily a writer of fiction in terms of my deeper interest... where am i going to go for interesting ideas? Obviously not to a literary blog/forum/ social set, but rather over to the links bar to a load of people who have not much interest in fiction....whereas i think in the sixties, seventies and eighties literature (alright FICTION, whatever) was a key part of the dialogue between music politics philosophy criticism etc

got any recommendations? I'd LOVE to find some inspiring fiction again...?

as for my own stuff.. yeah it's available as a free pdf online if i can find the link...i don't even have a copy of four of the last five novels i wrote...they were on a hard drive that broke down and is now somewhere in England, possibly a skip!

ah!

Frederik Bové said...

I love David Foster Wallace (and Thomas Pynchon, and Gass, and to a lesser extent Barth and Gaddis) but I still think your criticisms are spot-on.

In The Broom of the System there seems to be a personal 'critical' strategy developed from Wittgenstein. It is basically using Language Games to carve out your own little space in a world beseiged by capitalism and consumerism. So Lenores sister redefines her television as a psychotherapist, her brother redefines his telephone as a Lymph Node, her boyfriend uses made up stories to make her love him etc... It's kinda diffuse, but it is actually much like what Michel de Certeau proposes as anti-disciplinary tactics in his The Practices of Everyday Life. Lyotard also proposed Language games to have some sort of subversive potentials...

But the thing that is completely lacking - from DFW, but also from a lot of French postmodern philosophy - is solidarity, shared struggle etc. It only conceives of 'politics' as a personal struggle for 'selfrealization' or stuff like that.

And as DFW's authorship, the persons are more and more caught up in their psyches or their circumstances, until in Oblivion they are tragic puppets being crushed by fate. The darkness of DFW's later writing has also been pretty much glossed over in this latest revival, but it is at times really tough to get through Oblivion. Looking forward to reading The Pale King, though.

Michael Wilkinson said...

Hello Carl,
Have you read Bolano? 2066?

carl said...

ahhh now good point... you know what i haven't read any bolano.. well.. i started reading estrella distante in spanish a while ago and it seemed really promising and i do have a copy of the savage detective sitting around in the uk,

i assume you're recommending him...

tell you who i don't like much... Sebald....

tell you who i do like... James Lasdun.. and Yoko Ogawa though i've only read the short stories in the Diving Pool...

carl said...

the aim of maturity is the development of a political position and a praxis, this is, if you like, the synthesis of this supposed opposition of smart/kind, politics is the lived expression of your intellectual and moral capacity


oh and by the way i'm not claiming here that I have achieved this state of maturity.. far from it..

Michael said...

Yes, I'd recommend Bolano. Only him and Richard Yates have done anything for me fiction wise in the past few years. Savage Detectives is good but 2666 is special, Infinite Jest seems like one trite conceit after another in comparison.
I tried reading Girl With Curious Hair after reading Yates... couldn't hack it, just seemed like empty pyrotechnics.

carl said...

and that's bolano sold! i love Yates and yeah you're right, as to be honest Yates is one of the few people whose stuff has really got to me over the past few years...this is perhaps the one moment in my life where i'm happy to be in total agreement with Nick Hornby

i think empty pyrotechnics is a good phrase...

do we know each other michael? i like the jut of your cib and ask you to send me an email so i can add you tho 70s 80s and 90/00s blogs...

carl said...

@ frederick..

oblivion sounds like the point where wallace crosses over with ligotti...

Michael said...

We haven't met Carl. I'm a fan, I've read the blog for a while (and the 70s, 80s, 90s blogs) after exploring the links on Mark K-Punk's site. My email is mikawildus@hotmail.com. It was funny reading your comments about your reading growing up, it was almost exactly the same for me, even down to the Styron.. they had quite a few of his in the local library.
I'd be interested to read your take on 2666, anything I've read on it is either ambivalent or gushing, neither much use...
To be fair on DFW, I liked some of the journalism, Consider the Lobster and his piece on Federer..