Author Spotlight
David Foster Wallace and Imagining Moral Fiction
David Foster Wallace was never doing anything wrong. Even Wallace’s first published story, “The Planet Trillaphon as It Stands in Relation to the Bad Thing”–published in 1984 by the Amherst Review, written presumably at the age of 22–bears most of his stylistic earmarks circa Infinite Jest, and grapples with themes that would echo throughout much of his work to follow: infinity, fear, the risk of autobiography, fiction as an event, the struggle to empathize–the struggle to simply be in one’s own skin. All of this with a keen and self-aware sense of humor which dares you not to let Wallace’s cheeky, vigorous and, behind all that, ultimately hurt voice crawl into your head and stay there. But toward the end of his life, Wallace wasn’t sure, any longer, if his stylistic approach to the themes he felt to be most urgent–the themes that ran, almost doctrinairally, obsessively, through both his fiction and nonfiction–was truly effective in the big, big way he wanted it to be. He wanted to pare down the ecstasy of his prose, empty his sentences of self in a move toward mindfulness, toward sacrifice. Partly, I think Wallace’s stylistic shift (which we will see in full force soon when his final, unfinished novel, The Pale King, hits) was simply him doing good work; no artist as intelligent and unremittingly inventive as Wallace could stay working in the same mode for long. But and also (just kidding; I won’t do that here), I think Wallace, the whole time, imagined his work as a call-to-arms to the writer inside of every reader, the reader inside of every writer. In his essay “E Unibus Pluram,” Wallace points toward exactly the kind of shift in literary consciousness–and moral consciousness–away from what he saw as the destructive impulses of postmodernism, the shift which he could never, for whatever reason, fully effect in his own work:
The next real literary ‘rebels’ in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of ‘anti-rebels,’ born oglers who dare to step back from ironic watching, who have the childish gall to actually endorse single-entendre values. Who treat old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and fatigue. These anti-rebels would be outdated, of course, before they even started. Too sincere. Clearly repressed. Backward, quaint, naive, anachronistic. Maybe that’ll be the point, why they’ll be the next real rebels. Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk things. Risk disapproval. […] Who knows. Today’s most engaged young fiction does seem like some kind of line’s end’s end.
I want to concentrate on Wallace’s understanding of the fictionist as, essentially and necessarily, an artist concerned with ethics, with how and why we do the things we do, with aesthetics as absolute freedom, with evil and with personal truth–truth concealed by a lie. And I want to ask why we are not more concerned with his vision. Why we do not, by and large, see aesthetics as ethics, as an ethical act, a metapolitics, for which we, as writers with the power and duty to transform, are deeply and inescapably responsible. And how we get from ethics to moral literature: literature with deep conviction and passion toward the event of truth.
Wallace is that rare figure who at once serves as a mogul for the experimentalist community, and makes bank as a bestseller. As such, it’s surprising to me that his call-to-arms has never really caught fire in any significant way. I’m sure there are exceptions, of course, but what concerns me most is the faultily posited distinction between language-based and ethical literature, particularly in terms of a critical disposition. That is, literature which, in one way or another, demands that the reader react to its law–a law which may or may not take the form of style and language. When we talk about style, language, form, we are already talking about ethics, about politics. There is no such thing as a work of art for-itself.
When Plato banished the poet in The Republic, he did the same to the politician of the real. It is only when they are both given space to speak that we can begin to imagine democracy–and whose fault is it that art has more or less left politics to blink through its dust? The politician heeds dissensus in the same way the artist creates it. Perhaps the artist confronts the viewer with a fragmented vision of the sublime, as in Beckett. Or perhaps the artist collapses the borders between the private and the public, the everyday and the gallery-mounted, as in Diane Williams. The artist transgresses his or her own law, transforms the spectator into an actor. The artist is politician within the bounds of art as metapolitics.
All of this to say: we are in bad faith, are we not, when we conceive of the work of art as functional only in an aesthetic space, as an object for-itself and nothing more? when we focus on the lie instead of the truth, something like God, the unconditioned condition for that lie: the infinite, the secret beyond revelation?
How do we define that work where a moral truth–a human verity, a choice, a decision and fidelity to that decision–hides behind a lie, a stylized surface? Well, we don’t. We cannot possibly. Because there are no accessible moral truths. There are no human verities, and decisions are never final. If I want to write morally passionate fiction, I’m going to have to sacrifice my truth to the democratic field of ethics, to the act of dissensus which is constantly questioning its own dissent. But let’s say I am a writer. I can craft my work such that it takes place as a moral event. I can conceive of my work as a gift. The moral conditionality of my work moves unto the infinite, the space of ethics. The Open, the absent, what allows for the present, the aesthetic, to do its work. However, if ethical space is open, infinite, and radically indeterminate, how do I know that the reader will receive my personal truth as absolute? Well, I don’t. I know nothing. Perhaps this is the moment, the gamble, which–writes Maurice Blanchot in The Space of Literature–“frees the sacred contained in the work, gives the sacred to itself, to the freedom of its essence, to its essence which is a freedom.” This moment is diametrically and dialectically opposed to the act of reading, which Blanchot describes as “the revelation of the unique work”: the revelation of the secret. The economizing of what is outside of any economy.
So, again, what does it matter if I’m a morally passionate writer, when it’s all resolved and sutured by reading anyway? Because, as much as Wallace cared for the reader, his aesthetic/ethical theory is a call for the writer, and not the reader, to answer. A call for infinite action, for the full-bodied giving of gifts, for hands clasped in prayer. “I” must inaugurate my work as an event, as a total and moral truth, and then send my work, constituted as such–as moral, as personal, as my own–into the infinite. “I” must know, before I do so, that my gift can never be returned. This kind of mindfulness, of self-sacrifice, results in the affection for the reader which, for Wallace, behooves all writers. By another name, one might call it love.
Now, let’s see Wallace’s love in motion. As a community concerned with overturning old strictures, it’s only natural we would privilege how something is said, style or form, over what precisely is said, content. Or that we would equate form with content, holding tight to the notion that content emerges from language and sound, and remains in play with form. But since content and form are deeply interlinked and in play, perhaps it matters just as much what you say as how you say it. That’s why, to me, a story like “Good Old Neon” is more effective and resonant than one like “The Suffering Channel,” both from Wallace’s 2004 collection, Oblivion. The sentences in both stories are finely cared for, though those of the latter are more complex and typical of Wallace. But when the sentences are basically bare, his work, his style, speaks for itself. Can you feel it? Do these sentences from “Good Old Neon” not slow your breathing?:
The truth is you’ve already heard this. That this is what it’s like. That it’s what makes room for the universes inside you, all the endless inbent fractals of connections and symphonies of different voices, the infinities you can never show another soul. And you think it makes you a fraud, the tiny fraction anyone else ever sees? Of course you’re a fraud, of course what people see is never you. And of course you know this, and of course you try to manage what part they see if you know it’s only a part. Who wouldn’t? It’s called free will, Sherlock. But at the same time it’s why it feels so good to break down and cry in front of others, or to laugh, or speak in tongues, or chant in Bengali–it’s not English anymore, it’s not getting squeezed through any hole.
Naturally, it’s more powerful in context; anyone who’s read the story will know what I’m talking about (and goddamn, the next sentence!). His style is all there: the rhythm, the breathless voice, the perfect syllabic stretches. But it’s not like you could listen to this voice talk about anything. Because, the point is, it wouldn’t talk about anything. The voice inscribes what is said with the urgency of its very saying. One gets the sense that this voice lives at all for the sake of these select sentences, that it has self-sacrificed for them. There is, in effect, an equalized play between form and content. Between aesthetics and ethics as aesthetics. Between the gift and the receipt. Possibly, perhaps this is a glimpse of what Wallace calls morally passionate fiction. Likely it’s just fiction. Who knows.
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Tags: davd foster wallace, ethics, moral fiction
I really have no idea what you are saying in this essay. Hopefully someone can explain to me in layman’s terms. All I know, or think I know about DFW, was that he was obsessed with finding a centered self hidden among all the tangles of consciousness, and he seemed to be despairing that he couldn’t find one. It would have helped him, I think, if he had realized that there is no centered self, that being a fraud is unavoidable. I mean, I take it for granted that I’m a fraud, and that I’m not a particularly good social actor sometimes. It’s not that big of a deal to me. Authenticity, to me, seems to be a quaint issue. As for morals, well, I’m pretty amoral as it is, so I tend not to worry about morality when I write. I try not to judge.
I really have no idea what you are saying in this essay. Hopefully someone can explain to me in layman’s terms. All I know, or think I know about DFW, was that he was obsessed with finding a centered self hidden among all the tangles of consciousness, and he seemed to be despairing that he couldn’t find one. It would have helped him, I think, if he had realized that there is no centered self, that being a fraud is unavoidable. I mean, I take it for granted that I’m a fraud, and that I’m not a particularly good social actor sometimes. It’s not that big of a deal to me. Authenticity, to me, seems to be a quaint issue. As for morals, well, I’m pretty amoral as it is, so I tend not to worry about morality when I write. I try not to judge.
Fantastic post.
Fantastic post.
“Good Old Neon” is completely incredible. “The Soul is Not a Smithy,” also, my favorite.
Thanks for this, Alec. This essay was one of several posts, links or conversations here on the Giant during the last week that I’ve found clarifying. Helps me figure out what I’d like to accomplish.
“Good Old Neon” is completely incredible. “The Soul is Not a Smithy,” also, my favorite.
Thanks for this, Alec. This essay was one of several posts, links or conversations here on the Giant during the last week that I’ve found clarifying. Helps me figure out what I’d like to accomplish.
irony and detachment aren’t a generation, they are a style, so dfw craps the bed on that first quote, but yeah, this is a great post, alec.
irony and detachment aren’t a generation, they are a style, so dfw craps the bed on that first quote, but yeah, this is a great post, alec.
I love “craps the bed.”
I love “craps the bed.”
i think he has this epiphany in one of the stories narrated by a dead person in oblivion
i think he has this epiphany in one of the stories narrated by a dead person in oblivion
Loved this, Alec, especially how it assembles all its vectors to gather on this:
One gets the sense that this voice lives at all for the sake of these select sentences, that it has self-sacrificed for them. There is, in effect, an equalized play between form and content. Between aesthetics and ethics as aesthetics. Between the gift and the receipt.
Really beautiful stuff. I like how you draw the subtle but pivotal gap – and overlap – between aesthetics and ethics as aesthetics. Aesthetics are not ineluctably ethical or political but nether are they not ethical or political either. Nor are they some play of the two. They are riven with their own conditionality, which manifests itself in their struggle to exceed or smash conditions. So that an aesthetic act can be stripped bare of ethical assertion even as it retains a basis or coordination in ethics or politics, ineluctably. I’m thinking of Holocaust testimonies here, among the most ethically infinite and impossible of literatures. Or, aternatively, one can declare ones self as committed to what has been understood as an utterly aesthetic universe – in a saying like Burroughs’s mantra where nothing is true and everything is permitted – but the ethic re-emerges in the commitment to that idea, because the universe is not so amenable to remaking as to actually make nothing true, nor is it prone to guarantee anything so privy as a special relationship between the truth of nothing and the permission of everything. For, if nothing were true, what of permission? Permission itself would become a lie which would mean only a number of things are allowed to eventuate, irregardless of their “permission” to do so. This is absolutely the stuff Wallace struggled with all the way. It’s just sad that in being the author of such incredible insights he was, in a sense, at odds with their inspiration. All things feel limited when they come from here.
Loved this, Alec, especially how it assembles all its vectors to gather on this:
One gets the sense that this voice lives at all for the sake of these select sentences, that it has self-sacrificed for them. There is, in effect, an equalized play between form and content. Between aesthetics and ethics as aesthetics. Between the gift and the receipt.
Really beautiful stuff. I like how you draw the subtle but pivotal gap – and overlap – between aesthetics and ethics as aesthetics. Aesthetics are not ineluctably ethical or political but nether are they not ethical or political either. Nor are they some play of the two. They are riven with their own conditionality, which manifests itself in their struggle to exceed or smash conditions. So that an aesthetic act can be stripped bare of ethical assertion even as it retains a basis or coordination in ethics or politics, ineluctably. I’m thinking of Holocaust testimonies here, among the most ethically infinite and impossible of literatures. Or, aternatively, one can declare ones self as committed to what has been understood as an utterly aesthetic universe – in a saying like Burroughs’s mantra where nothing is true and everything is permitted – but the ethic re-emerges in the commitment to that idea, because the universe is not so amenable to remaking as to actually make nothing true, nor is it prone to guarantee anything so privy as a special relationship between the truth of nothing and the permission of everything. For, if nothing were true, what of permission? Permission itself would become a lie which would mean only a number of things are allowed to eventuate, irregardless of their “permission” to do so. This is absolutely the stuff Wallace struggled with all the way. It’s just sad that in being the author of such incredible insights he was, in a sense, at odds with their inspiration. All things feel limited when they come from here.
Nice post, Alec. I only quibble with DFW’s dichotomy with the following. Why can’t some emerging writer be both self-conscious AND specialize in single-entendres? Or perhaps work in double-entendres that don’t have anything to do with the aesthetic qualities of the work — thereby aggravating the catholic critics wielding an injudicious scalpel; that is, James Wood and (it would appear based on his recent Ferris review) Wyatt Mason? I’d like to see an army of writers sacrificing “clean” prose for an almost total capitulation to the sincere and the visceral. You should check out David Shields’s forthcoming book, that is, if you haven’t already.
Nice post, Alec. I only quibble with DFW’s dichotomy with the following. Why can’t some emerging writer be both self-conscious AND specialize in single-entendres? Or perhaps work in double-entendres that don’t have anything to do with the aesthetic qualities of the work — thereby aggravating the catholic critics wielding an injudicious scalpel; that is, James Wood and (it would appear based on his recent Ferris review) Wyatt Mason? I’d like to see an army of writers sacrificing “clean” prose for an almost total capitulation to the sincere and the visceral. You should check out David Shields’s forthcoming book, that is, if you haven’t already.
Okay, but does “DW” the character and DFW the actual deceased author actually believe what Neil’s saying there about the written word?
Okay, but does “DW” the character and DFW the actual deceased author actually believe what Neil’s saying there about the written word?
beautiful, alec. i think one of the biggest reasons why i love, worship, adore, and fear DFW is because he’s capable of, as nabokov would say, “producing that sob in the spine” with the skimpiest of sentences; and yet, turn the page and you’re reading the language of annular physics.
beautiful, alec. i think one of the biggest reasons why i love, worship, adore, and fear DFW is because he’s capable of, as nabokov would say, “producing that sob in the spine” with the skimpiest of sentences; and yet, turn the page and you’re reading the language of annular physics.
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Everyone who ever goes to writing school needs to read this essay if only to be forced to consider the problem of creating writing that exists only within an “aesthetic space” versus that which enters an ethical/moral sphere. Thanks for writing this. Smart and necessary.
Everyone who ever goes to writing school needs to read this essay if only to be forced to consider the problem of creating writing that exists only within an “aesthetic space” versus that which enters an ethical/moral sphere. Thanks for writing this. Smart and necessary.
Fucking solid post.
I think this is the first time I’ve read about the symbiotic relationship between aesthetics and ethics.
Wonderfully written…
Fucking solid post.
I think this is the first time I’ve read about the symbiotic relationship between aesthetics and ethics.
Wonderfully written…
The first Wallace I read was “Yet another instance of the porousness of certain borders XXI”, and then a weirdo version of “Infinite Jest” that I got at an American bookstore in Rome, because I fucking hated Italy so much and wanted something that brought me home in some way before returning. It wasn’t Italy, I was stuck there for a few weeks at the tail end of a “grand tour” of a sort, and I missed North America and its problems, I missed vastness, and basketball, and those Mary Hart induced seizures. I noticed then how North American fiction suffered an age-old comparison complex with European writing. Henry James picked it up, so did Henry Miller, and Hemingway, etc. It always came back to the same thing, even in the academic fiction produced in the wake of Yale criticism and “post-modern” (i.e. French) theory. Wallace saw the coming avant-garde as imminent writing, that would signal a return to the basic premise of expression that begins most forays into art-making in the first place. My guess is he’d have called Ellison’s “Invisible Man” just that type of radically new writing, or maybe Elizabeth Smart’s mixed prose, despite the anachronism. Rather like how the Bauhaus started with expressionist/Utopian leanings, but then turned to bland technological practice. A conversation with an Israeli friend brought me to the interpretation of the Bauhaus, a man who yearns for a new expressiveness, free of violent disorder vs. more violent disorder thinly disguised with stilted bureaucratese. Strange that most of the writing after Wallace’s suicide has veered between roughly the same points. But not here, which is really good.
The first Wallace I read was “Yet another instance of the porousness of certain borders XXI”, and then a weirdo version of “Infinite Jest” that I got at an American bookstore in Rome, because I fucking hated Italy so much and wanted something that brought me home in some way before returning. It wasn’t Italy, I was stuck there for a few weeks at the tail end of a “grand tour” of a sort, and I missed North America and its problems, I missed vastness, and basketball, and those Mary Hart induced seizures. I noticed then how North American fiction suffered an age-old comparison complex with European writing. Henry James picked it up, so did Henry Miller, and Hemingway, etc. It always came back to the same thing, even in the academic fiction produced in the wake of Yale criticism and “post-modern” (i.e. French) theory. Wallace saw the coming avant-garde as imminent writing, that would signal a return to the basic premise of expression that begins most forays into art-making in the first place. My guess is he’d have called Ellison’s “Invisible Man” just that type of radically new writing, or maybe Elizabeth Smart’s mixed prose, despite the anachronism. Rather like how the Bauhaus started with expressionist/Utopian leanings, but then turned to bland technological practice. A conversation with an Israeli friend brought me to the interpretation of the Bauhaus, a man who yearns for a new expressiveness, free of violent disorder vs. more violent disorder thinly disguised with stilted bureaucratese. Strange that most of the writing after Wallace’s suicide has veered between roughly the same points. But not here, which is really good.
irony and detachment need to go, whether style or generation. that’s the point. absolutely fantastic post, alec! in fact, this is the most impressive post i’ve seen on htmlgiant. you’ve nailed it on the head. and those who claim DFW’s so great but miss his central conclusion and offering as a writer (explained in this post) are completely missing the boat. art for its own sake, my best stab at “poetic prose” or my oh-so-clever metatextual games, is what so many experimental writers are peddling both now and for decades past, and it’s simply not good enough (and misanthropy doesn’t cut it either, folks! what kind of lazy birdshit is a book that preens like a peacock for hundreds of pages in the service of telling me little more than that it hates me and everyone else who’s ever breathed?). The most important figures of each age have had two elements in common: style-as-metaphysics, and moral passion. I’m talking about Rilke, Joyce, Beckett, Salinger, Foster Wallace, Bolano. All morally engaged, whether implicitly or explicitly. These are writers to respect and emulate. These are writers who (can be) love(d).
irony and detachment need to go, whether style or generation. that’s the point. absolutely fantastic post, alec! in fact, this is the most impressive post i’ve seen on htmlgiant. you’ve nailed it on the head. and those who claim DFW’s so great but miss his central conclusion and offering as a writer (explained in this post) are completely missing the boat. art for its own sake, my best stab at “poetic prose” or my oh-so-clever metatextual games, is what so many experimental writers are peddling both now and for decades past, and it’s simply not good enough (and misanthropy doesn’t cut it either, folks! what kind of lazy birdshit is a book that preens like a peacock for hundreds of pages in the service of telling me little more than that it hates me and everyone else who’s ever breathed?). The most important figures of each age have had two elements in common: style-as-metaphysics, and moral passion. I’m talking about Rilke, Joyce, Beckett, Salinger, Foster Wallace, Bolano. All morally engaged, whether implicitly or explicitly. These are writers to respect and emulate. These are writers who (can be) love(d).
[…] essay, really) on HTMLGIANT (an internet nexus for small-press authors and publishers) concerning David Foster Wallace and his advocation for/practice of writing fiction whose ethics and aesthetics …. It’s quite fantastic stuff. Foster Wallace’s call for youngish writers to risk being […]
“irony and detachment need to go, whether style or generation. that’s the point.”
Certain kinds of detachment have been overplayed, maybe, yes. (Although saying detachment needs to go when the author in question created the character Hal Incandenza seems kind of odd. . . .) But irony does -not- need to go. Many writers could be more careful about how they use it, but that’s nothing new. There will always be writers who use sarcasm/dry wit to do nothing more than preen.
“irony and detachment need to go, whether style or generation. that’s the point.”
Certain kinds of detachment have been overplayed, maybe, yes. (Although saying detachment needs to go when the author in question created the character Hal Incandenza seems kind of odd. . . .) But irony does -not- need to go. Many writers could be more careful about how they use it, but that’s nothing new. There will always be writers who use sarcasm/dry wit to do nothing more than preen.
“I’d like to see an army of writers sacrificing “clean” prose for an almost total capitulation to the sincere and the visceral.”
Why?
“I’d like to see an army of writers sacrificing “clean” prose for an almost total capitulation to the sincere and the visceral.”
Why?
sorry, this post is junk. it’s a weird combination of self-important academic banalities and self-important potheadedness. it sounds like it’s written by a victorian literature grad student after three joints and a fight with his girlfriend. for example:
A call for infinite action, for the full-bodied giving of gifts, for hands clasped in prayer. “I” must inaugurate my work as an event, as a total and moral truth, and then send my work, constituted as such–as moral, as personal, as my own–into the infinite. “I” must know, before I do so, that my gift can never be returned. This kind of mindfulness, of self-sacrifice, results in the affection for the reader which, for Wallace, behooves all writers.
hm. ‘full-bodied giving of gifts?’ and what is this gift? the writer’s ‘total and moral truth?’
gah.
sorry, this post is junk. it’s a weird combination of self-important academic banalities and self-important potheadedness. it sounds like it’s written by a victorian literature grad student after three joints and a fight with his girlfriend. for example:
A call for infinite action, for the full-bodied giving of gifts, for hands clasped in prayer. “I” must inaugurate my work as an event, as a total and moral truth, and then send my work, constituted as such–as moral, as personal, as my own–into the infinite. “I” must know, before I do so, that my gift can never be returned. This kind of mindfulness, of self-sacrifice, results in the affection for the reader which, for Wallace, behooves all writers.
hm. ‘full-bodied giving of gifts?’ and what is this gift? the writer’s ‘total and moral truth?’
gah.
I agree. If we look at irony within the context of this detachment — the simple incongruity Wallace addresses in the last bit quoted of prose and what it’s meant to communicate — it’s able to encompass the biggest problem he’s working to reconcile. How to achieve, through words, the sort of direct connection with another human being that is simpler and more direct with wordlessness? The “of course you’re a fraud” — he’s addressing the simple fraudulence of trying to put the meaning behind that paragraph into language at all. But he does it anyway, and that sort of irony is the necessary one, the one with a place in any honest fiction.
I agree. If we look at irony within the context of this detachment — the simple incongruity Wallace addresses in the last bit quoted of prose and what it’s meant to communicate — it’s able to encompass the biggest problem he’s working to reconcile. How to achieve, through words, the sort of direct connection with another human being that is simpler and more direct with wordlessness? The “of course you’re a fraud” — he’s addressing the simple fraudulence of trying to put the meaning behind that paragraph into language at all. But he does it anyway, and that sort of irony is the necessary one, the one with a place in any honest fiction.
Tracy and I enjoyed reading this together, though I’ll admit some of it was over our heads.
My goal is usually to write prose that suggests through its aesthetics that what’s happening is morally important, without offering any judgment.
Tracy and I enjoyed reading this together, though I’ll admit some of it was over our heads.
My goal is usually to write prose that suggests through its aesthetics that what’s happening is morally important, without offering any judgment.
Irony is commonly used by authors, especially the postmodernists, as a means of having a laugh at the reader’s or humanity’s expense. It’s irony with a sneer and no heart, or irony that hasn’t found a way to articulate what’s in its heart. I agree with Diana here that irony can’t be completely divorced from fiction if we’re talking about the original irony, which is to say one thing but mean another. But consider that phrase closely, and you’ll see that one is to MEAN something. The problem with many writers’ uses of irony is that they don’t mean anything by what they say, they don’t feel anything by what they say, or all they mean is that I have contempt for other people or I want to express meaninglessness. But Beckett already went as far as one can go with not knowing and meaninglessness, and all of his successors have been superfluous, from Barthelme to Auster (Don B. is not superfluous, I’ll take that back, but he doesn’t go anywhere meaningful post-Beckett; his best stories are verbal delights, but they’re hollow; when he tries to not be hollow, he’s just a poor man’s Beckett, sad to say) (I enjoyed Wittgenstein’s Mistress as well, very post-Beckett, but even that seems very minor compared to Beckett). So, this is not to say, abandon meaninglessness, abandon the saying of one thing but meaning another—this is to say, try harder to fail better at saying what you feel, and that could very well mean something to someone. Irony at its best is heartfelt meaning married to artifice.
Irony is commonly used by authors, especially the postmodernists, as a means of having a laugh at the reader’s or humanity’s expense. It’s irony with a sneer and no heart, or irony that hasn’t found a way to articulate what’s in its heart. I agree with Diana here that irony can’t be completely divorced from fiction if we’re talking about the original irony, which is to say one thing but mean another. But consider that phrase closely, and you’ll see that one is to MEAN something. The problem with many writers’ uses of irony is that they don’t mean anything by what they say, they don’t feel anything by what they say, or all they mean is that I have contempt for other people or I want to express meaninglessness. But Beckett already went as far as one can go with not knowing and meaninglessness, and all of his successors have been superfluous, from Barthelme to Auster (Don B. is not superfluous, I’ll take that back, but he doesn’t go anywhere meaningful post-Beckett; his best stories are verbal delights, but they’re hollow; when he tries to not be hollow, he’s just a poor man’s Beckett, sad to say) (I enjoyed Wittgenstein’s Mistress as well, very post-Beckett, but even that seems very minor compared to Beckett). So, this is not to say, abandon meaninglessness, abandon the saying of one thing but meaning another—this is to say, try harder to fail better at saying what you feel, and that could very well mean something to someone. Irony at its best is heartfelt meaning married to artifice.
you’re cynical, which is understandable, but it will lead you nowhere.
you’re cynical, which is understandable, but it will lead you nowhere.
irony, detachment, meaninglessness are human states of mind, what we feel (or don’t feel) at 3 in the morning. why would art abandon the description of a human state of mind? surely the next morning we might feel better and we might write that too, but this can’t invalidate our night.
irony, detachment, meaninglessness are human states of mind, what we feel (or don’t feel) at 3 in the morning. why would art abandon the description of a human state of mind? surely the next morning we might feel better and we might write that too, but this can’t invalidate our night.
Stephen,
First, I like your definition of useful irony as “heartfelt meaning married to artifice.” I’m not arguing against sincerity. But I think you could incorporate other useful forms of irony into the conversation. Irony doesn’t always signal misanthropy. I think irony can be politically relevant or communal, even – that is, a way of recognizing the absurdities inherent in social life and structures of power, and recognizing that others recognize them, and then laughing about it. Humanity at large, or the reader, shouldn’t always have to be the recipient of the sneer, if there is sneering happening. Maybe you’d say that this is what satire if for, but I think the two often work in tandem.
From an essay on “poetry and humor” by the poet Matthew Rohrer, at the Academy fo American Poets site:
“Earnestness is comforting. It wants to hug us. And we want to be hugged sometimes. But sometimes we want to laugh while poking holes in self-righteousness and oppression, whether it be literal political oppression or oppression of a quieter sort – cultural and aesthetic oppression. Irony and satire are such a good antidote to oppression because oppression needs to be earnest (or at least look earnest) in order to be feared by those it seeks to cow. Oppression cannot work alongside irony because it believes in its own righteousness and a monolithic concept of truth that must be asserted to the oppressed with a straight face. Irony and satire are the tools by which the oppressed get to make fun of the oppressors without the oppressors getting it.”
Stephen,
First, I like your definition of useful irony as “heartfelt meaning married to artifice.” I’m not arguing against sincerity. But I think you could incorporate other useful forms of irony into the conversation. Irony doesn’t always signal misanthropy. I think irony can be politically relevant or communal, even – that is, a way of recognizing the absurdities inherent in social life and structures of power, and recognizing that others recognize them, and then laughing about it. Humanity at large, or the reader, shouldn’t always have to be the recipient of the sneer, if there is sneering happening. Maybe you’d say that this is what satire if for, but I think the two often work in tandem.
From an essay on “poetry and humor” by the poet Matthew Rohrer, at the Academy fo American Poets site:
“Earnestness is comforting. It wants to hug us. And we want to be hugged sometimes. But sometimes we want to laugh while poking holes in self-righteousness and oppression, whether it be literal political oppression or oppression of a quieter sort – cultural and aesthetic oppression. Irony and satire are such a good antidote to oppression because oppression needs to be earnest (or at least look earnest) in order to be feared by those it seeks to cow. Oppression cannot work alongside irony because it believes in its own righteousness and a monolithic concept of truth that must be asserted to the oppressed with a straight face. Irony and satire are the tools by which the oppressed get to make fun of the oppressors without the oppressors getting it.”
Very good points, Jack, but re: that Rohrer quote, DFW has already addressed this in “E Unibus Pluram” when he points out that TV has co-opted and drained the catharsis out of irony and satire of this kind.
How could a supposed stylistic shift be evident “in full” from an incomplete manuscript?
Also, beauty equals evil. Just ask Avril.
Very good points, Jack, but re: that Rohrer quote, DFW has already addressed this in “E Unibus Pluram” when he points out that TV has co-opted and drained the catharsis out of irony and satire of this kind.
How could a supposed stylistic shift be evident “in full” from an incomplete manuscript?
Also, beauty equals evil. Just ask Avril.
one problem i’ve had with that rohrer essay and its argument (which is thoughtful and persuasive) is, to put it simply, funny commercials.
i.e. commercials that exploit the ironic gesture for the very purpose you mention: to establish a bunker community too smart and secret-coded for the oppressors to “get.” but then to establish this community or communal feeling solely for the sake of the consumer feeling “closer” or “more friendly” or “more in on the joke” with what they’re buying.
which is gross.
and makes me dislike poems that are only as “funny” and “quirky” as “quirky” commercials, because they usually seem a lot closer to these commercials than they do to Daniil Kharms.
my attitude toward these things is muddy at best, but i think it’s cyclical and fluid, this matter of oppression-fighting. the soviets are too earnest; irony belittles that. okay, awesome. but if late capitalism’s too ironic, further irony’s doing little more than perpetuating the big joke being played on everybody.
in other words, i don’t think irony always works against oppression. it depends on the oppression. you need the right sail for whatever wind’s shitting on you.
one problem i’ve had with that rohrer essay and its argument (which is thoughtful and persuasive) is, to put it simply, funny commercials.
i.e. commercials that exploit the ironic gesture for the very purpose you mention: to establish a bunker community too smart and secret-coded for the oppressors to “get.” but then to establish this community or communal feeling solely for the sake of the consumer feeling “closer” or “more friendly” or “more in on the joke” with what they’re buying.
which is gross.
and makes me dislike poems that are only as “funny” and “quirky” as “quirky” commercials, because they usually seem a lot closer to these commercials than they do to Daniil Kharms.
my attitude toward these things is muddy at best, but i think it’s cyclical and fluid, this matter of oppression-fighting. the soviets are too earnest; irony belittles that. okay, awesome. but if late capitalism’s too ironic, further irony’s doing little more than perpetuating the big joke being played on everybody.
in other words, i don’t think irony always works against oppression. it depends on the oppression. you need the right sail for whatever wind’s shitting on you.
ha! good call, stephen. we posted at the same time, and a better paraphrase of my slapdash comment would be a big hyperlink to “E Unibus Pluram.”
ha! good call, stephen. we posted at the same time, and a better paraphrase of my slapdash comment would be a big hyperlink to “E Unibus Pluram.”
I like this post, Alec. This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot, how it’s important to consider not even just WHAT fiction is doing, but THAT fiction really is doing something, even if it’s “just” in someone’s head. I just finished reading John Gardner’s “On Moral Fiction,” which I enjoyed, and you might as well.
Also, I really like the bit about being a rebel, what a risk really is. There’s a lot of “institutionalized rebellion” going on in the literary world, where taking a certain kind of established “risk” is consistently rewarded. I think here I’m specifically thinking of the poetry world, where you’ll almost never get punished for producing writing that “obscures narrative” through “discordant language,” no matter how sloppily or boring you do it. And indeed, this was interesting and avant-garde at one point, but now it’s so fully established that it’s no real risk at all. The real risk now is to write something direct, and have it matter to people. I think that’s unbelievably difficult.
I like this post, Alec. This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot, how it’s important to consider not even just WHAT fiction is doing, but THAT fiction really is doing something, even if it’s “just” in someone’s head. I just finished reading John Gardner’s “On Moral Fiction,” which I enjoyed, and you might as well.
Also, I really like the bit about being a rebel, what a risk really is. There’s a lot of “institutionalized rebellion” going on in the literary world, where taking a certain kind of established “risk” is consistently rewarded. I think here I’m specifically thinking of the poetry world, where you’ll almost never get punished for producing writing that “obscures narrative” through “discordant language,” no matter how sloppily or boring you do it. And indeed, this was interesting and avant-garde at one point, but now it’s so fully established that it’s no real risk at all. The real risk now is to write something direct, and have it matter to people. I think that’s unbelievably difficult.
austerity is preferable to squishy-headed preaching, and less irrelevant. (i like wittgenstein better than baudrillard, and DFW’s remorseless scorn better than anything).
austerity is preferable to squishy-headed preaching, and less irrelevant. (i like wittgenstein better than baudrillard, and DFW’s remorseless scorn better than anything).
I actually think criticising how this post/essay was written and what it states is more than fair. If you care enough to dig and strip away at the prose, the ideas underneath are decent enough but it could have used some work. I don’t find it superlative. Just my opinion.
I actually think criticising how this post/essay was written and what it states is more than fair. If you care enough to dig and strip away at the prose, the ideas underneath are decent enough but it could have used some work. I don’t find it superlative. Just my opinion.
Good conversation, guys. I’m still trying to figure all of this stuff out.
Good conversation, guys. I’m still trying to figure all of this stuff out.
fair enough, but “austerity” in the sense of saintliness or asceticism is much more valuable as a relevant model for others to appreciate/follow than is “austerity” that can be better called holier-than-thou snobbery, which isn’t relevant to anyone but the one who employs it (and the sycophants who need something soul-deadening to snicker at and live for).
fair enough, but “austerity” in the sense of saintliness or asceticism is much more valuable as a relevant model for others to appreciate/follow than is “austerity” that can be better called holier-than-thou snobbery, which isn’t relevant to anyone but the one who employs it (and the sycophants who need something soul-deadening to snicker at and live for).
amen
amen
A little bit off-topic, but has anyone read this book?: http://www.amazon.com/Although-Course-You-Becoming-Yourself/dp/030759243X
A little bit off-topic, but has anyone read this book?: http://www.amazon.com/Although-Course-You-Becoming-Yourself/dp/030759243X
Thanks for your thoughts on this idea, guys. I need to reread “E Unibus Pluram.” I feel like every time “irony vs. sincerity” gets discussed, my mind further paraphrases and simplifies and loses a lot of the nuance in Wallace’s original essay.
The observation about media’s use of irony complicates my thoughts on this, but I don’t want to dismiss it entirely, because I often have a reaction to what could be called irony or satire or absurdism that goes beyond the quirk of the joke and seems ecstatic and timeless. I just felt this way recently after finishing David Ohle’s The Camp. Maybe it’s worth noting that while that book satirizes an absurd, clownish villain and takes place around a seemingly contemporary factory, it also occurs in an imagined zone that almost seems feudal at times and doesn’t address mass media in the way that Infinite Jest does. But I think it addresses realistic political concerns in ways that aren’t dismissive, despite its weirdness and imaginal distance from the world.
I don’t think I’m laughing out of cynicism, or at least I hope not, and if there is that undercurrent then I think it’s important to investigate. I too am put off by irony when its primary register is the sneer. But I think it has more range than that, as a device.
(Perhaps what I’m looking for shouldn’t be called irony in the first place, and I have a terminology problem, but then any comedic device could be charged with seeming dismissive or glib. But I think a lot of comedy, and maybe even irony, goes way beyond dismissive and glib.)
Mike, I might amend your description too read “late capitalism is too ironic and too earnest…” Expressions of political power and economic power come across differently, but it seems to me that they’re organs of the same beast and require each other. Which sounds obtuse. But what I mean is that if “we” want to sell 50,000 Che Guevara silkscreens, then we’re going to be jaded, cynical, and hyper-aware enough to turn around and sell 50,000 different silkscreens, which make fun of the first set of silkscreens, to an even hipper, edgier crowd who get the irony. But if “we” want to sell a major policy change – like a foreign invasion – then we call on every greeting card emotion on the hallmark palette and we allude to divine visitations and we couldn’t be more earnest, even if it’s a staged and calculated earnestness. I think irony and satire can still be useful tools, in the latter case, in revealing the distance between the policies themselves and the disingenuous and staged emotional appeals used to sell them. Maybe what the media/commercial arm of the beast needs in response from literature and art is more candor and honesty. Then again I always tend to weasel around arguments by calling for co-existence. But I think there is good work out there that combines these two modes that are so often seen as oppositional (“irony VS. sincerity”).
But don’t funny commercials need some baseline of self-seriousness? They can only be so wacky, right, or the intended sale is lost in the confusion of non-sequiturs.
One criticism I might lodge at myself: one sense in which irony and satire might be unequipped to address social problems is not that they are always too cold, smug, scornful, and distant, but that this gesture toward the communal is only one of consolation, nothing more. It’s like a defense mechanism, though a shared one in which people can reach out to other people and recognize affinities and share sympathies. But from that point of recognition, a real solution to the problem of oppression isn’t really addressed. I don’t think literature can provide that solution, but I don’t think that this means it should ignore a moral or ethical sense.
I think my problem is that I often feel like the wind’s shitting from different directions and in circles, to borrow your phrasing. Tornadoes of shit, everywhere, but it makes for a great challenge, whether your methods are ironic or earnest or something of both.
Thanks for your thoughts on this idea, guys. I need to reread “E Unibus Pluram.” I feel like every time “irony vs. sincerity” gets discussed, my mind further paraphrases and simplifies and loses a lot of the nuance in Wallace’s original essay.
The observation about media’s use of irony complicates my thoughts on this, but I don’t want to dismiss it entirely, because I often have a reaction to what could be called irony or satire or absurdism that goes beyond the quirk of the joke and seems ecstatic and timeless. I just felt this way recently after finishing David Ohle’s The Camp. Maybe it’s worth noting that while that book satirizes an absurd, clownish villain and takes place around a seemingly contemporary factory, it also occurs in an imagined zone that almost seems feudal at times and doesn’t address mass media in the way that Infinite Jest does. But I think it addresses realistic political concerns in ways that aren’t dismissive, despite its weirdness and imaginal distance from the world.
I don’t think I’m laughing out of cynicism, or at least I hope not, and if there is that undercurrent then I think it’s important to investigate. I too am put off by irony when its primary register is the sneer. But I think it has more range than that, as a device.
(Perhaps what I’m looking for shouldn’t be called irony in the first place, and I have a terminology problem, but then any comedic device could be charged with seeming dismissive or glib. But I think a lot of comedy, and maybe even irony, goes way beyond dismissive and glib.)
Mike, I might amend your description too read “late capitalism is too ironic and too earnest…” Expressions of political power and economic power come across differently, but it seems to me that they’re organs of the same beast and require each other. Which sounds obtuse. But what I mean is that if “we” want to sell 50,000 Che Guevara silkscreens, then we’re going to be jaded, cynical, and hyper-aware enough to turn around and sell 50,000 different silkscreens, which make fun of the first set of silkscreens, to an even hipper, edgier crowd who get the irony. But if “we” want to sell a major policy change – like a foreign invasion – then we call on every greeting card emotion on the hallmark palette and we allude to divine visitations and we couldn’t be more earnest, even if it’s a staged and calculated earnestness. I think irony and satire can still be useful tools, in the latter case, in revealing the distance between the policies themselves and the disingenuous and staged emotional appeals used to sell them. Maybe what the media/commercial arm of the beast needs in response from literature and art is more candor and honesty. Then again I always tend to weasel around arguments by calling for co-existence. But I think there is good work out there that combines these two modes that are so often seen as oppositional (“irony VS. sincerity”).
But don’t funny commercials need some baseline of self-seriousness? They can only be so wacky, right, or the intended sale is lost in the confusion of non-sequiturs.
One criticism I might lodge at myself: one sense in which irony and satire might be unequipped to address social problems is not that they are always too cold, smug, scornful, and distant, but that this gesture toward the communal is only one of consolation, nothing more. It’s like a defense mechanism, though a shared one in which people can reach out to other people and recognize affinities and share sympathies. But from that point of recognition, a real solution to the problem of oppression isn’t really addressed. I don’t think literature can provide that solution, but I don’t think that this means it should ignore a moral or ethical sense.
I think my problem is that I often feel like the wind’s shitting from different directions and in circles, to borrow your phrasing. Tornadoes of shit, everywhere, but it makes for a great challenge, whether your methods are ironic or earnest or something of both.
This is a great post, Jack–excellent points all around, and I intend to say more later. I want to say now that I never posited that irony vs. sincerity non-relation. I think a judicious and careful work of art would blend the nuances of both.
This is a great post, Jack–excellent points all around, and I intend to say more later. I want to say now that I never posited that irony vs. sincerity non-relation. I think a judicious and careful work of art would blend the nuances of both.
eloquent thoughts, jack. i wholeheartedly agree that irony-as-capitalist tool somehow feeds on/is fed on by disingenuous-sincerity-as-military-industrial-justification. and i like your thoughts on irony as consolation, which i believe is one of the reasons it’s so easy to sell via irony, because all we’ve been selling since bernays is feeling good, right? and why not feel good together, in on the joke?
and i think you’re right that there is tremendous work to be done by melting the “two” modes together. what i’m expressing, i think, is mostly an exhaustion with irony, particularly goofy irony, particularly irony not only of the sneer variety but of the “look-how-everything’s-fucked-absurdity-is-reflected-via-this-gesture-of-absurdity” variety. and, following that, an exhaustion with how his form of goofiness (you’re right; we both know what we’re talking about, i think, but it might not be irony) is fundamentally afraid of the world. or rejects engagement in favor of hip-cocoonery.
what i’m really for, i guess, is curiosity, and i don’t know if there’s a place for “irony” in curiosity, since irony as a gesture at least pretends to take place post-conclusion, but i do agree that curiosity should have the same self-awareness and self-criticism as irony, and that curiosity should be aware of its own construction. i’m thinking, on top of my head, of robert walser, and maybe even—in a completely different way—william t. vollmann.
anyway, good discussion, and really salient points. cool to talk with you about it. =)
eloquent thoughts, jack. i wholeheartedly agree that irony-as-capitalist tool somehow feeds on/is fed on by disingenuous-sincerity-as-military-industrial-justification. and i like your thoughts on irony as consolation, which i believe is one of the reasons it’s so easy to sell via irony, because all we’ve been selling since bernays is feeling good, right? and why not feel good together, in on the joke?
and i think you’re right that there is tremendous work to be done by melting the “two” modes together. what i’m expressing, i think, is mostly an exhaustion with irony, particularly goofy irony, particularly irony not only of the sneer variety but of the “look-how-everything’s-fucked-absurdity-is-reflected-via-this-gesture-of-absurdity” variety. and, following that, an exhaustion with how his form of goofiness (you’re right; we both know what we’re talking about, i think, but it might not be irony) is fundamentally afraid of the world. or rejects engagement in favor of hip-cocoonery.
what i’m really for, i guess, is curiosity, and i don’t know if there’s a place for “irony” in curiosity, since irony as a gesture at least pretends to take place post-conclusion, but i do agree that curiosity should have the same self-awareness and self-criticism as irony, and that curiosity should be aware of its own construction. i’m thinking, on top of my head, of robert walser, and maybe even—in a completely different way—william t. vollmann.
anyway, good discussion, and really salient points. cool to talk with you about it. =)
Yes, Alec and Mike, excellent discussion all around! And I love that you bring curiosity into this mix. I think the key in any mode is to be wary of becoming so absorbed in the mode as to allow rejection of engagement/pushing away the world/self-exile.
And Alec, yeah, I was definitely reading into that opposition from the comment streams and NOT your post.
Sorry to make a river of this comment string, everybody, but it’s been fun.
Yes, Alec and Mike, excellent discussion all around! And I love that you bring curiosity into this mix. I think the key in any mode is to be wary of becoming so absorbed in the mode as to allow rejection of engagement/pushing away the world/self-exile.
And Alec, yeah, I was definitely reading into that opposition from the comment streams and NOT your post.
Sorry to make a river of this comment string, everybody, but it’s been fun.
it will be published in april.
it will be published in april.
Alex
as friend engaged n the conversation with the author in question at the time the project was bred, john gardner, the novelist, essayist and teacher’s long essay, “On moral fiction” was the subject of derision in ’85 and ’86,when we came upon it adjunct to the use of his “The art of fiction,” as a handbook in the program for creating the realistic character fiction of the market of the moment. Gardner was unappreciated, and Dave’s Kantian perspective (his father Jim’s specialty in philosophy was ethics, methinks) on the amoral culture of artistic indulgence inherent in a state university MFA program was obvious, and can be traced in many of the issues of professorial neglect and miseducation in the Enfield Tennis Academy in Jest, among other obvious comments in his work. this and his experiences as a middle-class student worker in an elite, and distinctly upper-class undergaduate college, activated his ultimate abhorrence of useless ambition, as opposed to useful work. Intention is a trap in both directions though, for the author in pursuit the whale of a perfectly told tale, and the reader in the quest to understand the one behind the pen. the truth is manifold, vision uncertain.
unfortunately, since that time, the sense of amorality, untempered selfish expression of the gutteral, or more beastial aspects of humanity’s possibilities has grown worldwide.
integrity, of whatever kind, is a choice, that of character, consciousness, personality, profession, community, or state, must be remade in each instance, or resign all to the fate of random chance interactions of weather, whim and wound. Surfing the emotions of one and all at once sounds like one hell of a tsunami sized show. perhaps we ask four of five billion to flow with it, though 1 doubts it can be done.
Thank you for your thought in this pc, Alex, this was a fine bit of honest expression.
semper fi
anon
Alex
as friend engaged n the conversation with the author in question at the time the project was bred, john gardner, the novelist, essayist and teacher’s long essay, “On moral fiction” was the subject of derision in ’85 and ’86,when we came upon it adjunct to the use of his “The art of fiction,” as a handbook in the program for creating the realistic character fiction of the market of the moment. Gardner was unappreciated, and Dave’s Kantian perspective (his father Jim’s specialty in philosophy was ethics, methinks) on the amoral culture of artistic indulgence inherent in a state university MFA program was obvious, and can be traced in many of the issues of professorial neglect and miseducation in the Enfield Tennis Academy in Jest, among other obvious comments in his work. this and his experiences as a middle-class student worker in an elite, and distinctly upper-class undergaduate college, activated his ultimate abhorrence of useless ambition, as opposed to useful work. Intention is a trap in both directions though, for the author in pursuit the whale of a perfectly told tale, and the reader in the quest to understand the one behind the pen. the truth is manifold, vision uncertain.
unfortunately, since that time, the sense of amorality, untempered selfish expression of the gutteral, or more beastial aspects of humanity’s possibilities has grown worldwide.
integrity, of whatever kind, is a choice, that of character, consciousness, personality, profession, community, or state, must be remade in each instance, or resign all to the fate of random chance interactions of weather, whim and wound. Surfing the emotions of one and all at once sounds like one hell of a tsunami sized show. perhaps we ask four of five billion to flow with it, though 1 doubts it can be done.
Thank you for your thought in this pc, Alex, this was a fine bit of honest expression.
semper fi
anon
shit. you’re better than me, ziggy.
shit. you’re better than me, ziggy.
zzzzipp — i get worse every day, you’ll catch up in no time.
stephen — yr comment is either above or below my reading level, i can’t tell. one thing i do like though is the image of an sycophant snickering at soul-deadening snobbery. your penchant for sssss’ is engrossing.
zzzzipp — i get worse every day, you’ll catch up in no time.
stephen — yr comment is either above or below my reading level, i can’t tell. one thing i do like though is the image of an sycophant snickering at soul-deadening snobbery. your penchant for sssss’ is engrossing.
I have to agree with ziggy. This essay felt very grad-studenty, like listening to two TAs getting lit and hashing it out in the next booth: it’s very earnest, very sincere, and it sounds very silly to anyone who’s not in the same program they are.
I know this blog is a self-selecting society, and everyone is here because on some level they do care or are interested in these issues (as most of the posts attest). But I can’t help thinking that the bulk of people out there in the world DON’T care, and not because they’re ignorant or immoral or apolitical. They’re simply too busy coping with the challenges of the real world — like losing their jobs, losing their health coverage, losing hope — to care what DFW has to say about the moral vacuum within us, and too tired to affect an appropriate level of detachment and irony about themselves and their circumstances.
I’ve never understood why people (some, anyway) force the connection between aesthetics and ethics and politics to the point where it becomes “a metapolitics, for which we, as writers with the power and duty to transform, are deeply and inescapably responsible.” Who told you that you have the “power and duty” to do anything? Did an administrator from some agency contact you when you first started writing and tell you this?
It’s a personal belief and conviction sent out in the guise of a universal imperative. If that’s your deal then that’s great. Go to, and prepare for war. But it’s not everyone’s deal. Some people’s deal is story. For others it’s lyricism. Some people like to take their kids to monster truck shows.
And the very idea of a necessarily moral-political writer necessarily presents problems. At the risk of sounding sensationalist, does anyone question that Hitler wrote “morally passionate fiction” when he wrote Mein Kampf? His passion flared up in the right place at the right time to not only do as much evil as the world has ever seen, but to marry it to an assembly-line process that (I would guess) made it all the easier to commit. This is obviously an over-the-top example, but seriously, where do you draw the line? Mao Tze Tung? Pat Robertson? Postmodernism? I like Orwell and consider him sane and prescient and wise — mostly because I agree with him. But a hell of a lot of people agreed with these other writers and thought they were wise and prescient, too.
Why would or should anyone accept someone else’s preferences or values over their own? It’s terribly self-important and egotistical to presume that you (speaking generally) have any claim to someone else’s time and attention unless they grant it to you (and as a writer, I would presume that’s something you’d be duly grateful for).
I think one poster summed up the major problem with the essay: “If you care enough to dig and strip away at the prose, the ideas underneath are decent enough.” There’s a tremendous amount of sincerity and enthusiasm (which I do not doubt is genuine), but not much by way of clarity. It’s almost like reading a new-age manifesto. Aside from the obvious egotisim and aforementioned Hitlerian risks, what does “inaugurate my work as an event, as a total and moral truth” even mean? I know all those words, but I have no idea what this statement is supposed to state.
It makes me feel like something is being obscured and deliberately hidden, and that’s not (in my opinion) what good writing should do. You shouldn’t have to “dig and strip away at the prose” to get what the writer is saying.
The whole concept (as I understand it) behind this essay is swimming in narcissistic self-revelry. To take one example:
“‘I’ must know, before I do so, that my gift can never be returned. This kind of mindfulness, of self-sacrifice, results in the affection for the reader which, for Wallace, behooves all writers. By another name, one might call it love.”
How tremendous an ego do you have to have to sincerely believe you are giving the world a gift so precious “it can never be returned” (I read ‘returned’ as ‘repaid’)? There certainly is love and affection here, but it’s self-directed. The question of fraudulence is relevant: doesn’t this kind of self-serving, self-awed stance suggest a very different “mindfulness” — the mindfulness that the writer’s ego will be fed by the cosmic praise that undoubtedly will resound from all corners of the universe at so great, so gargantuan a work as this story/novel/book/poem, the likes of which the world has never seen and will likely never see again.
I respect that people look for different things in what they read and write, and usually those things reflect or follow their own personal values and pleasures. But I just do not get the aesthetic-moral-political connection. It seems irrelevant in the larger world, on occasion dangerous, astoundingly self-absorbed, and if nothing else, condescending and unable to admit any other non-moral, non-political points of view — which is to say it is exclusionary and, in an odd way, isolationist.
But I don’t get the impression anyone here would want those labels applied to their work or the works they enjoy reading.
I have to agree with ziggy. This essay felt very grad-studenty, like listening to two TAs getting lit and hashing it out in the next booth: it’s very earnest, very sincere, and it sounds very silly to anyone who’s not in the same program they are.
I know this blog is a self-selecting society, and everyone is here because on some level they do care or are interested in these issues (as most of the posts attest). But I can’t help thinking that the bulk of people out there in the world DON’T care, and not because they’re ignorant or immoral or apolitical. They’re simply too busy coping with the challenges of the real world — like losing their jobs, losing their health coverage, losing hope — to care what DFW has to say about the moral vacuum within us, and too tired to affect an appropriate level of detachment and irony about themselves and their circumstances.
I’ve never understood why people (some, anyway) force the connection between aesthetics and ethics and politics to the point where it becomes “a metapolitics, for which we, as writers with the power and duty to transform, are deeply and inescapably responsible.” Who told you that you have the “power and duty” to do anything? Did an administrator from some agency contact you when you first started writing and tell you this?
It’s a personal belief and conviction sent out in the guise of a universal imperative. If that’s your deal then that’s great. Go to, and prepare for war. But it’s not everyone’s deal. Some people’s deal is story. For others it’s lyricism. Some people like to take their kids to monster truck shows.
And the very idea of a necessarily moral-political writer necessarily presents problems. At the risk of sounding sensationalist, does anyone question that Hitler wrote “morally passionate fiction” when he wrote Mein Kampf? His passion flared up in the right place at the right time to not only do as much evil as the world has ever seen, but to marry it to an assembly-line process that (I would guess) made it all the easier to commit. This is obviously an over-the-top example, but seriously, where do you draw the line? Mao Tze Tung? Pat Robertson? Postmodernism? I like Orwell and consider him sane and prescient and wise — mostly because I agree with him. But a hell of a lot of people agreed with these other writers and thought they were wise and prescient, too.
Why would or should anyone accept someone else’s preferences or values over their own? It’s terribly self-important and egotistical to presume that you (speaking generally) have any claim to someone else’s time and attention unless they grant it to you (and as a writer, I would presume that’s something you’d be duly grateful for).
I think one poster summed up the major problem with the essay: “If you care enough to dig and strip away at the prose, the ideas underneath are decent enough.” There’s a tremendous amount of sincerity and enthusiasm (which I do not doubt is genuine), but not much by way of clarity. It’s almost like reading a new-age manifesto. Aside from the obvious egotisim and aforementioned Hitlerian risks, what does “inaugurate my work as an event, as a total and moral truth” even mean? I know all those words, but I have no idea what this statement is supposed to state.
It makes me feel like something is being obscured and deliberately hidden, and that’s not (in my opinion) what good writing should do. You shouldn’t have to “dig and strip away at the prose” to get what the writer is saying.
The whole concept (as I understand it) behind this essay is swimming in narcissistic self-revelry. To take one example:
“‘I’ must know, before I do so, that my gift can never be returned. This kind of mindfulness, of self-sacrifice, results in the affection for the reader which, for Wallace, behooves all writers. By another name, one might call it love.”
How tremendous an ego do you have to have to sincerely believe you are giving the world a gift so precious “it can never be returned” (I read ‘returned’ as ‘repaid’)? There certainly is love and affection here, but it’s self-directed. The question of fraudulence is relevant: doesn’t this kind of self-serving, self-awed stance suggest a very different “mindfulness” — the mindfulness that the writer’s ego will be fed by the cosmic praise that undoubtedly will resound from all corners of the universe at so great, so gargantuan a work as this story/novel/book/poem, the likes of which the world has never seen and will likely never see again.
I respect that people look for different things in what they read and write, and usually those things reflect or follow their own personal values and pleasures. But I just do not get the aesthetic-moral-political connection. It seems irrelevant in the larger world, on occasion dangerous, astoundingly self-absorbed, and if nothing else, condescending and unable to admit any other non-moral, non-political points of view — which is to say it is exclusionary and, in an odd way, isolationist.
But I don’t get the impression anyone here would want those labels applied to their work or the works they enjoy reading.
I was just introduced to you and your brilliant writing by Kate’s mom Tracy Reilly. I loved your essay on Mr. Wallace and am still reeling at his choice to suicide-however sad and tragic his death may be and disappointed we may feel that he had still much to write- I believe Mr. Wallace’s legacy continues when writers like yourself seek to illuminate his writings. It is the illumination that begets the resurrection of the soul of the man.
I was just introduced to you and your brilliant writing by Kate’s mom Tracy Reilly. I loved your essay on Mr. Wallace and am still reeling at his choice to suicide-however sad and tragic his death may be and disappointed we may feel that he had still much to write- I believe Mr. Wallace’s legacy continues when writers like yourself seek to illuminate his writings. It is the illumination that begets the resurrection of the soul of the man.
Brilliant. I agree wholeheartedly.
Brilliant. I agree wholeheartedly.
[…] like the “postmodern” attribute, instead hoping his writing possessed more of a humanist morality, more heartfelt than the clever intertextual nihilism of his […]
Just wanted to say I read this whole discussion (two years late, I guess), and found it all very thought-provoking; glad to have found a place on the internet where intelligent, agreeable conversation is the norm.
[…] And when you finish that, if you haven’t yet, read Alec Niedenthal’s essay on Wallace on HTML Giant (sorry not trying to snag all y’all’s stuff, but your cup is […]