Volleys about David Foster Wallace
In his recent piece on David Foster Wallace in the New York Review of Books, Wyatt Mason sets up Ford Madox Ford’s:
I have, I am aware, told this story in a very rambling way so that it may be difficult for anyone to find their path through what may be a sort of maze. I cannot help it…. When one discusses an affair—a long, sad affair—one goes back, one goes forward. One remembers points that one has forgotten and one explains them all the more minutely since one recognizes that one has forgotten to mention them in their proper places and that one may have given, by omitting them, a false impression. I console myself with thinking that this is a real story and that, after all, real stories are probably told best in the way a person telling a story would tell them. They will then seem most real.
…spikes it with Theodore Dreiser’s "
"…this falls into the category of ‘good explanations of a bad method.’
[Doesn't Ford know...]
…that a story, once begun…should go forward in a more or less direct line, or at least that it should retain one’s uninterrupted interest. This is not the case in this book. The interlacings, the cross references, the re-re-references to all sorts of things which subsequently are told somewhere in full, irritate one to the point of one’s laying down the book."
…then saves and digs this out with David Foster Wallace’s
Serious Novels after Joyce tend to be valued and studied mainly for their formal ingenuity. Such is the modernist legacy that we now presume as a matter of course that “serious” literature will be aesthetically distanced from real lived life.
Pointing to Ippolit’s “Necessary Explanation” in The Idiot, Wallace asks:
Can you imagine, continues Mason, any of our own major novelists allowing a character to say stuff like this (not, mind you, just as hypocritical bombast so that some ironic hero can stick a pin in it, but as part of a ten-page monologue by somebody trying to decide whether to commit suicide)? The reason you can’t is the reason he wouldn’t: such a novelist would be, by our lights, pretentious and overwrought and silly. The straight presentation of such a speech in a Serious Novel today would provoke not outrage or invective, but worse—one raised eyebrow and a very cool smile…. People would either laugh or be embarrassed for us. Given this…who is to blame for the unseriousness of our serious fiction? The culture, the laughers? But they wouldn’t (could not) laugh if a piece of morally passionate, passionately moral fiction was also ingenious and radiantly human fiction. But how to make it that?
And returns it with:
More than any writer in his generation, Wallace dedicated his fiction to the asking of that question and to answering it at the aesthetic distance that modernism had imposed. That dedication may be seen in the boldness of Wallace’s answers, the dozens of daring formal solutions that sought new and—for those with the patience to take them on their terms; those for whom being “aesthetically distanced” by form wasn’t inevitably a “bad method”—revelatory ways of reframing the question with which fiction is always preoccupied: how to be in the world.
In both of Wallace’s late story collections, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men and Oblivion, one sees their author develop, deploy, and discard one new form after another, each of them, to my mind, as ingenious as it is human, each achieving the kind of seriousness that Wallace was reaching for and that fiction occasionally attains…
All Wallace’s formal ingenuity would have been for naught if he hadn’t been intent on using these forms to probe at the most injured parts of being. If his work does impose an aesthetic distance, it never sought to do less than bring particular persons as close as possible."
Two questions of interest here which require pondering. The fact that Marcus assigns so much importance to authorial intent. and: Does Wallace succeed in producing passionately moral, ingenious human fiction?
Why is it that Ippolit’s speech, if written today, would not be taken seriously? Is Dostoevsky given a free pass to our connecting and being affected by his work – simply because he wrote prior to the appearance of this age’s ‘aesthetically distanced’ reader? Has an un-returnable genie escaped the bottle? Are we somehow now less capable or willing to suspend disbelief? The struggle of current writers to ‘connect’ in face of today’s cynical knowingness is a worthy, historied one. The question, remains: how is it that today’s readers, new to The Idiot, can, nonetheless, get so much from it. Is there a double standard at play?
