what to do after
I know very little about the personal demons that seem to have caught David Foster Wallace, but I have always thought that, in purely literary terms, he had managed to pose himself an extraordinary conundrum: What do you do after you've written Infinite Jest? I have mixed feelings — admiration, delight, frustration, annoyance — about that book, but there's no doubt that it was a bravura performance and a book as ambitious in its way as, say, Ulysses and Gravity's Rainbow are in theirs. But Joyce and Pynchon found their ways past those massive works, and this is true whether one likes what came after or not. My feeling is that Wallace never got past Infinite Jest. Whether this had anything to do with his troubles I don't know; I simply wish that we had gotten another fully-imagined balls-to-the-wall book from him.
I find myself thinking, now, of his wonderful 2006 essay on Roger Federer, which draws on Walace's own history as a tennis player, and especially its concluding paragraph:
In the same emphatic, empirical, dominating way that Lendl drove home his own lesson, Roger Federer is showing that the speed and strength of today’s pro game are merely its skeleton, not its flesh. He has, figuratively and literally, re-embodied men’s tennis, and for the first time in years the game’s future is unpredictable. You should have seen, on the grounds’ outside courts, the variegated ballet that was this year’s Junior Wimbledon. Drop volleys and mixed spins, off-speed serves, gambits planned three shots ahead — all as well as the standard-issue grunts and booming balls. Whether anything like a nascent Federer was here among these juniors can’t be known, of course. Genius is not replicable. Inspiration, though, is contagious, and multiform — and even just to see, close up, power and aggression made vulnerable to beauty is to feel inspired and (in a fleeting, mortal way) reconciled.
Glorious passage.
He is indeed deft in deploying his motifs and richly lyrical in his surgical precision.
‘to see, close up, power and aggression made vulnerable to beauty”; oh my Heavens.
Most wonderful to see you here. I’d turned aside from AS, fearful of the felt hole in its fabric; but lo, no hole! And in finest form, I might add.
Ave atque ave.
— felix culpa · Sep 15, 02:29 AM · #
I certainly lament the passing of such a gifted writer. But on a literary note, the thing that bothers me about Wallace, McCarthy, Pynchon and other postmodern writers is that they are so overtly nihilistic and deliberately obscure and difficult. Saying this probably makes me some kind of unhip dinosaur(despite the fact i’m only 22). But it is interesting to compare them, for instance, to Dickens/Hugo/Tolstoy. These writers made a conscious effort to reach everyone in their writings. And they actually believed things. Maybe they believed stupid or naive things, but they actually believed their writings could make the world a better place. I feel like so many post modern writers only want to tell us that humanity is a sick organism capable only of exploitation and destruction. That’s certainly the impression I get reading Blood Meridian.
I repeat, I think Wallace was an incredibly gifted writer, and it’s a terrible tragedy that he went this way. But I do wish we had more books that are, as Alan says, “on the side of life.”
— Bert · Sep 15, 02:43 AM · #
You know, Bert, the worst kind of snobbery is reverse snobbery. Saying that you are an unhip dinosaur loses its punch when everyone claims to be unhip. If whats hip is whats popular, hating on pomo lit (if thats what it is) is damn hip.
And, by god, Tolstoy most certainly did not make a conscious effort to reach everyone in his writing. Tolstoy was many things, but he was no populist.
— Freddie · Sep 15, 03:15 AM · #
Bert,
I won’t throw the “reverse snobbery” line, but I’ll suggest that what seems nihilist to a 22-year-old’s sensibilities can be pretty life-affirming farther down the line. In a few years, you might reread Blood Meridian (or, if I may recommend, The Crossing) and discover that its view of humanity is different than you once thought. Not everything difficult is obscurantist, and not everything bleak is nihilist.
— Matt Frost · Sep 15, 03:26 AM · #
DFW was not a thoughtless postmodernist, and he was indeed on the side of life. Just read his 2005 commencement address at Kenyon College. He wanted, with an intensity that now seems pitiable, to escape the claustrophobic hell that is the solipsistic self. The problem is, he tried to do so through dint of his own efforts, and that is ultimately a fool’s errand. I am not blaming him for his suicide; who but God knows what demons tormented him? My point is simply that DFW could see past the obscurantist clutter of the postmodern, and on into a brighter land. He took no joy in nihilism, so far as I could see.
One example: DFW’s stylistic quirk most often decried is that maddening use of footnotes, even to short, simple essays. I suppose you could criticize him on the grounds that he was so in love with his own writing that he couldn’t bear to live a single pearl out. But I see the footnotes quite differently: far from being the kind of intentionally difficult writer so characteristic of the pomo crowd, DFW could not bear to leave his thinking unclear for his readers; he seemed almost compelled at times to explain himself fully, to lay out the detailed trail of his reasoning to make sure the reader could follow. That seems to me more the mark of a nervous writer who’s constantly anticipating readers’ complaints, and doing his best to remedy his own lack of clarity . . . .
I do also wonder, though, what a writer he might have been if he’d not been so heavily influenced stylistically by the postmodernists. His talent was so big and original that an MFA program might well have been the worst place for him during his formative years as a writer.
Finally, a tip for those who want to begin reading DFW: start with the essays. They range from hilarious to heartbreaking, and the facets of DFW’s voice and talent are on display everywhere.
— mr tall · Sep 16, 05:32 AM · #
“In a kind of aesthetic manifesto, he once wrote that irony and ridicule had become ‘agents of a great despair and stasis in U.S. culture’ and mourned the loss of engagement with deep moral issues that animated the work of the great 19th-century novelists.”
—Michiko Kakutani’s tribute, “An Appreciation: Exuberant Riffs on a Land Run Amok,” NYT, 9/14/08.
— Julana · Sep 16, 12:04 PM · #
I was overly harsh, and I don’t mean to be a jerk. I just dislike the fact that more people criticize pomo lit than not, and they all use the “This may not be hip, but…” line. When, in fact, criticizing pomo lit is indeed hip.
— Freddie · Sep 16, 02:04 PM · #
Look, I’m not saying these guys aren’t very talented. And the remark on Tolstoy was right on. I guess my problem is not really with postmodern writers, but with our lack of talented pop writers in the postmodern era. For instance, it is unthinkable today that we would have writers like Kipling or Robert Louis Stevenson, that is, writers who made no bones that they were writing pop lit, but happened to be very good at it and produced work of lasting quality. Can anyone honestly say that we will still be reading Dan Brown and Danielle Steele decades from now?
One of the reasons why I enjoy reading Alan Jacobs is the essay he wrote on Harry Potter. It articulates many of the frustrations I have with the “high/low” divide in literature. Michael Chabon’s recent essay on entertainment and literature says similar things.
I certainly don’t mean to sound like an arrogant prick or anything like that. I’m just someone who was raised on Seinfeld and The Simpsons. And I wish that writers of prose didn’t reject these kinds of pleasures as immature and unartistic.
— Bert · Sep 16, 07:36 PM · #
Bert, you need to read more Wallace before you even think about venturing another opinion about him. If you have his work and concluded that he was not “on the side of life,” you should start over. At least look at his Kenyon Commencement Speech; I don’t think it’s very good, but it will serve this purpose.
Also, what does it even mean to say that it is “unthinkable today that we would have writers like Kipling or Robert Louis Stevenson”? First, has it ever occurred to you that Kipling coexisted with a lot of Dan Brown-like hacks who we’ve now forgotten? Second, what would it even mean for a writer now to be “like Kipling”? Tell me more. Third, in terms of “writers who made no bones that they were writing pop lit, but happened to be very good at it and produced work of lasting quality,” how about TC Boyle, Walter Kirn, maybe Walter Moseley, Junot Diaz, Michael Chabon, Bruce Wagner? The slightly more literary Richard Powers, George Saunders, even Philip Roth, who’s been immensely popular lately? What do you want? Are their politics not to your taste?? OPEN YOUR EYES. There’s a lot of good stuff out there, and you can buy it even in airports!
— on the other hand · Sep 17, 03:51 AM · #
Not meaning to pile on poor Bert, but one more tip: if you’re interested in finding out more about what current authors might be the Stevensons or Kiplings of our time, head immediately to http:2blowhards.com. Start reading Michael Blowhard on books, genre, etc.
— mr tall · Sep 17, 07:25 AM · #
Hey, thanks for the nod from Mr. Tall, who’s a classy and brainy reader I’m always eager to get tips from.
Can I venture, though, that I think y’all are being ‘way too hard on Bert? He didn’t enjoy DFW’s writing — no sin in that, is there? I didn’t have much time for it myself. Found it to be tiresome — games-playing, brainiest-kid-in-the-class stuff. Even the nonfiction … Although I’m a huge tennis fan, I was never able to make through DFW on Roger Federer. Too much straining, too much huffing and puffing, too much show-offing — too many words, too much DFW, not enough tennis, not enough Federer. Give me a good sports-page writer any day. Or even better Martin Amis, who seems to me to be at his best when he writes about tennis.
And Bert makes some perfectly decent points. For one, there’s no question that Tolstoy, Kipling, etc, were ‘way more accessible than DFW. For another, the writing on The Simpsons and Seinfeld is/was often smashingly good, even if non-“literary.” There’s something wrong with liking accessible?
Now, whether it’s a good thing to be bringing up one’s misgivings about DFW’s work during the week after his suicide …
— Michael Blowhard · Sep 17, 11:25 PM · #
Hi Michael;
Thanks for the kind words. I recall one of your posts in which you discussed DFW, and your not being enthralled with his pyrotechnics. I’m usually not a fan of the pomo types, but DFW is for me the exception that proves the rule. There’s an underlying earnestness to his work — a sweetness, almost — that is to me uncharacteristic of the typically pouty and solipsistic pomo types.
I agree that at times his stylistic affectations got out of hand. He took chances all over the place in his writing; some of them worked, some didn’t. I found The Broom of the System unreadable, for example — that one was clearly written under heavy pomo influence. As I said above, I really think it would have been better for Wallace the Writer to have worked on a fishing boat or in a dry cleaner’s or as an itinerant fruit picker or anything other than spending time in an MFA program.
— mr tall · Sep 18, 02:18 AM · #
As I said above, I really think it would have been better for Wallace the Writer to have worked on a fishing boat or in a dry cleaner’s or as an itinerant fruit picker or anything other than spending time in an MFA program.
This is just total faux-populist bullshit. Thomas Pynchon isn’t a “real man”? Gabriel Garcia Marquez? Jose Saramago? You can have whatever opinions on literature you want, but don’t try to leverage that opinion with some garbage biographical argument. sheesh.
— Freddie · Sep 19, 01:09 AM · #
It’s not faux-populist bullshit to suggest that MFA programs churn out tedious work or impair writers’ creativity. And “manliness” isn’t the issue at hand here — nobody used the phrase “real man” until you did, Freddie.
— Matt Frost · Sep 19, 01:41 AM · #
Indeed. I didn’t mean DFW needed to learn to be a ‘real man’, I simply meant it might have been better for him to have gotten out of academia for a while, away from all the head games, and done just about anything else — maybe corporate banking or a white shoe law firm would have done just as well.
BTW, Freddie, I read some of your blog, and enjoyed it very much.
Mr Tall
— mr tall · Sep 19, 03:14 AM · #