Wallace Agonistes

    Oh, good, another essay about David Foster Wallace.* We actually don’t have a lot to say about the bastard — and let us reiterate that, in our brief experience of the man, he was in fact a complete bastard — that you haven’t already heard. Yes, we lement the rapid beatification of the weird ghost of him that lives on in media. Sure, we ape his style — we all ape his style, especially yr. corresps., who came to the great writer’s work late but with voracity and a certain convert’s zeal that led to a brief but transformative period of post-adolescent growing pains, replete with page-long sentences and a 900-word vocab list on our hard drive that we have cribbed from every book, article, podcast, and yes (even**) television show we have watched for the last four years. And sometimes we worry about escaping his shadow, as do all white GenX male writers with a penchant for footnotes and a sneaking suspicion that we aren’t so much tortured artists as, you know, assholes. The irony being is that yr corresps haven’t actually finished Infinite Jest yet, though we talk about it every summer, though we own 3 or maybe 4 copies of it, though we’re quite proud, to the point of mentioning it rather too often, that we’ve read Gravity’s Rainbow and V. (twice!) — this could be a compensatory gesture, not unlike a man with a micropenis buying a candy red Hummer — and found both tomes to be rewarding and really, honestly, not all that difficult.

*by us or by anybody

** especially?

    But we read this piece in Vulture earlier today and it has been eating away at yr corresps ever since. Much of the piece is admirable and wonderful and accurate and high and true and fine and moist and sticky and lovely, especially the bits about the beatification above-mentioned. But —

    Oh, fuck it, I’m not going to go all in on that device, it was killing me. Go read “Big Red Son” . DFW, the bastard, does it way better than I ever could anyway. Suffice it to say that if you read that piece, and then you read basically anything I’ve written on this blog in the last oh, say, forever, you’ll notice a certain resonance between DFW’s style and my own — not a shock — and that, in general, he does it way better than me and I should probably give up on this writing thing and go into refrdigerator repair — refridgerators, those aren’t going to get phased out like home phones and VCRs, are they? Aren’t billions of us still going to need to find a way to keep our food from rotting without burying it in the ground with a block of salt?

    I’m off track. Anyway, not that the people at Vulture care, but I have a super-complex relationship with their output, which is often admirably thoughtful and does a good job of executing the necessary postmodern task*** of taking all media seriously and not being snobbish about television or new media.† But there’s also a strong strain of twittishness in a lot of their criticism, emblamatized by the site’s obsequeous stance towards the mean, soulless, manipulative, gimmicky and unverisimilitous Mad Men. (I don’t like Mad Men. And yes, I’ve watched most of it. Leave me alone.) In attempting to make sure everything is taken seriously, sometimes things that are fundamentally not serious (like costume soaps about vacuous asshats who work in advertising) end up receiving a lot of praise that feels to me disingenuous, or at least — what? — a little blind.

***one at which DFW failed, BTW

† I’ve long thought that the reason DFW failed at this, by the way, is that he had just unremittingly dreadful taste in everything other than books. The occasion for all these effing essays of late is probably the release of the certain-to-be-horrifying End of the Tour, based on a book-length interview with the much better title Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself. Wallace’s taste in movies runs the gamut from great action — Die Hard — to terrible action — Braveheart — to, basically, camp — anything by David Lynch. He’s revealed to be a lover of disposable grunge queen Alanis Morrissette. (When I met him, the rumor was going around that he was into the execrable Xian grunge band Creed, which, ugh.) And TV, my god — it was hard not to have bad taste in TV for a long time, but in truth he seems more concerned with game shows and commercials than the rather long list of quality, non-cynical stuff that has been airing on TV since way before the modern “golden age”: I challenge you to mount a serious argument that Barney Miller was cheap or ugly. It wasn’t.

    Nope, still off track. Anyway, what I was trying to say is that I actually kind of liked the DFW essay, but I have some complicated feelings about the author’s thoughts on “This Is Water”, DFW’s Kenyon College graduation address that has, since his suicide, become a sort of touchstone of the beatification movement. I mean, some of those are rooted in my complicated feelings about DFW and his apparent feeling that there was a crisis of sincerity in the world and part of his mission was to lean in to his own feelings, break through the impenetrable distance between minds, and calm said crisis with his genuineness. I’ve never felt any crisis of sincerity. I’ve leveled the criticism at DFW before that he has a tendency (as do we all) to universalize his own problems; he performs a sort of spiritual metynomy by which his alienation comes to stand for the human condition, and I don’t know that that’s accurate.˚

˚That said, the alienation is, I think, real, at least for a lot of us — it just manifests differently. I have no problem genuinely feeling things; sometimes it feels like I feel too many things, which is why I avoid human contact a lot of the time. But I do, despite having no reason to, feel completely apart from humanity, if we define “humanity” as “the ongoing project of keeping the species of homo sapiens sapiens alive and in progressively better circumstance."

    Christian Lorentzen, the Vulture author, performs precisely the same move in criticizing “This Is Water”. If you haven’t read “This Is Water”, there’s an extended passage about a generic you who is going to the supermarket after the end of a long day, and struggling with the effort of not growing impatient, or angry, or judgemental, or any of those things. Lorentzen writes:

Perhaps I’m an outlier, but I’ve mostly enjoyed my visits to grocery stores over the years. In any event, it strikes me that there are more difficult things about adulthood than navigating the express-check-out line, and more that it demands of us than overcoming self-centeredness and reflexive sourness. What Wallace describes as a universal rite of passage into maturity seems more to me like the daily struggles of a serious depressive, which he was. To me, it’s the least interesting version of himself he ever put to the page.

Fairplay if you find this version of DFW boring. I don’t. But this feels like a willful misreading of what the essay is about. This isn’t meant to be “a universal rite of passage into maturity”. It’s about this one huge thing, a thing that it is transparently obvious that nearly every human struggles with — empathy.†† The example of the grocery store seems esepcially apt to me, simply because it is mundane, because it happens to nearly everybody at one time or another that they are in a public place with a bunch of strangers and the combination of exhaustion and neon lights and screaming babies and bad news on the radio and a crappy job and so on and so forth just erases empathy and turns them into a vat of seething grievances. It’s not that it’s like this all the time. It’s that it’s like this for everybody sometime. If it’s never been like that for you, then congratulations, you are the greatest human of all time and the rest of us are shitty little assholes.

†† It seems to me that the only people who don’t struggle with empathy are sociopaths. They just don’t have it, or ignore it.

    You can hear me starting to get pissed off. I’m going to dial that back. But this is just another example of a trend in criticism that has been cropping up over the last few years — a sort of ad hominem, bad-faith criticism that assumes the worst of an author and engages mostly in smug self-congratulation. My instinct is to say that this is an outgrowth of the infinite combination of the internet and the fetishization of authenticity, but I don’t really know enough about the former or care enough about the latter to make an informed judgment. Anyway, it blows.

    Okay, this is too long now. I’m done. Don’t be a jerk.