(This is an excellent essay that has pointed me back to revisiting David Foster Wallace's work.)
Death Is Not the End: David Foster Wallace - His Legacy and his Critics
By Jon Baskin
The Point
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The generation of novelists that followed Beckett pursued what may one day be known as a series of incredibly interesting dead ends. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Joyce, Woolf, Stein and Faulkner had developed experimental narrative techniques to explore what they took to be the new facts of human experience. They announced that the fragmented and self-conscious modern subject should be represented by a fragmented and self-conscious prose. Yet by the time Wallace arrived on the scene in the 1980s, writers were turning the techniques developed by the modernists against the idea of the modern subject, as well as most experiences we would conventionally call “human.” For the advanced artists of the 1960s and 70s, alienation was not a subjective experience but a social fact. It was no accident that their hostility to what had formerly been considered the novelist’s chief task—depicting subjective consciousness via the convention of character—had culminated in a “Literature of Exhaustion” charting the imminent death of the novel.
Though he admired John Barth, Don DeLillo and especially Thomas Pynchon, Wallace was critical of what he believed to be two dangerously antiquated aspects of their fiction. Philosophically, he took issue with what had become the habitual postmodern announcement that there were no longer any subjects. Barth, Pynchon, DeLillo—as well as Wallace’s popular contemporaries, Brett Easton Ellis and Mark Leyner—all sought to demonstrate how culture subsumed subjectivity. In place of characters, they presented mechanized or commercially determined automatons. Even the great novels of Pynchon and DeLillo treated subjectivity as at most a product of nostalgia for an epoch past saving. This made for insightful cultural commentary and a fiction so consistently alienating that the alienation itself became familiar. In early interviews and stories, Wallace indicated he would take a different tack. What deserved the novelist’s attention was the persistence of subjectivity, not its extinction. “If you operate, which most of us do, from the premise that there are things about the contemporary U.S. that make it distinctively hard to be a real human being, then maybe half of fiction’s job is to dramatize what it is that makes it tough,” he said in an interview. “The other half is to dramatize the fact that we still ‘are’ human beings, now. Or can be.”
Wallace became the chronicler of a world where it was “tough” to be human, but not impossible. This was the subjective world of his readers, themselves animated by an anxious consciousness of their limitations and contingency. It was an article of faith for him that the educated person still came to serious literature for answers to the desperate questions of existence. If literature’s response was that this person, despite all appearances, no longer existed in any meaningful sense, this was a way of ending a conversation, not starting one. Wallace did not shrink from depicting an inhuman world in his novels, but he returned to the problem of what it felt like to carry on a human life in such a world. This is why it is a mistake to connect his own textual experiments—jump cuts, essayistic digressions, endnotes—with the distancing techniques characteristic of his postmodern predecessors. They are more appropriately linked with Wittgenstein’s language games, deployed to help the author mimic, explore and ultimately expose the confusions of a demographically distinct reader.
Wallace’s second critique was stylistic; rhetorically, too, he believed the advanced writers of his time had fallen into obsolescence. The problem received its clearest expression in the influential 1993 essay-cum-manifesto, “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction.” The thesis of the essay was that a once-subversive postmodern rhetoric predicated on “irony and ridicule” no longer qualified as an appropriate challenge to a culture which had assimilated rebellion, cynicism and irony into its crassest popular forms: game shows, Pepsi ads, Married With Children. It was up to artists, Wallace believed, to offer counsel on questions of judgment, emotion and truth. Most troubling was the possibility that his contemporaries were failing at this task, instead contributing unwittingly to the ruling obsession with hip nihilism, “value-neutral” morality and an essentially ironic response to life’s challenges. The essay concluded with Wallace’s memorable vision of what would count as truly counter-cultural art. In contrast to “the old postmodern insurgents [who] risked the gasp and squeal: shock, disgust, outrage, censorship … the next real literary ‘rebels’… might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the ‘Oh how banal’.”
While “E Unibus Pluram” inspired an assortment of earnest millennial fiction, (most of it published in McSweeney’s), critics like Michiko Kakutani, A.O. Scott and Walter Kirn would later chastise Wallace from precisely what they considered to be the essay’s point of view. They pointed out that his fiction—including Girl With Curious Hair, the collection of short stories he had published two years prior—contained plenty of irony and cynicism, not to mention a battery of pop references and authorial interruptions. In fact, neither Girl nor any of Wallace’s mature writing was at odds with the argument in “E Unibus Pluram,” which most critics seemed to have stopped reading halfway through. Wallace believed irony and ridicule had to be recognized as regnant, and potentially destructive, American norms. But since American literature “tends to be about U.S. culture and the people who inhabit it,” the contemporary writer had to acknowledge those norms in and through his fiction. Wallace might have wanted to tackle the fundamental questions head-on, like Dostoevsky—he even expressed such a desire in a late essay. The cultured postmodern reader, however, was programmed to tune out forms of address that did not rise to a certain level of self-consciousness or sophistication. It was neither possible nor desirable for contemporary fiction to eschew the ironic entirely, although there might, Wallace hinted, emerge a writer who recognized it as a means rather than an end.
The broader ambition of Wallace’s early stories was to explore how it felt to live in the world of Jeopardy, The David Letterman Show, McDonald’s, The Sot-Weed Factor, Gravity’s Rainbow and White Noise. And how it felt was: lonely. The opening story in Girl takes place on the set of Jeopardy, where one of the producers intones about “these lonely or somehow disturbed people who’ve had only the TV all their lives.” The collection’s concluding novella, “Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way,” concerns three young adults, all consumers of literary fiction, and all incapable of carrying on significant conversations with anyone but themselves. No less “lonely or somehow disturbed” than the TV-watchers, the aspiring intellectuals are the distressed products of what Wallace clearly considered irresponsible or immoral art. One is “fascinated with the misdirecting pose of bloodless abstraction.” Another thinks: “To be a Subject is to be Alone. Trapped. Kept from yourself”; the third that “cynicism and naïveté are mutually exclusive.” For Wallace, these characters are deluded by a false theory—what Wittgenstein would have called a “picture.” According to the theory, the authentic contemporary subject, just like the real artist, sacrifices sincerity and fellow feeling for the deeper truths of abstraction, alienation and cynicism.
The artist cannot afford to be deceived about the nature of his historical moment. Given the dialectic of escapism and conformity that had characterized mid-century popular culture, ironic alienation may have once qualified as an appropriate artistic strategy. The children of what Wallace once called “probably the single most self-absorbed generation since Louis XIV” faced new and opposite “horrors.” Chief among them: “anomie and solipsism and a peculiarly American loneliness: the prospect of dying without once having loved something more than yourself.” Alienation was for these Americans a way of life, not a confrontational art form. The writer for this generation would have to know his readers well enough to detain them with the appropriate challenge. The challenge would also be the therapy. The novel for our times would compel its reader to confront the limitations of his intellectual commitments.
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To Read the Whole Essay
Also check out:
Andy Battaglia on David Foster Wallace books
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