Let us commence:
“But most days, if you’re aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line. Maybe she’s not usually like this. Maybe she’s been up three straight nights holding the hand of a husband who is dying of bone cancer. Or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the motor vehicle department, who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a horrific, infuriating, red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but it’s also not impossible. It just depends what you want to consider. If you’re automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won’t consider possibilities that aren’t annoying and miserable. But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options.”
The above is from "This is Water," DFW's 2005 speech delivered at Kenyon College Commencement. I have to say that part of the reason I enjoy (well, sometimes they're hard to enjoy, per se) his works is that they never cease to remind me of why I write. As Virginia Woolf said, we, as writers, can "never forget Mrs. Brown"-- we can never forget the person-in-the-corner, the people we pass, the ones we perfunctorily interact with every day, because each one is living in his or her own novel as grand and expansive as our own. It's all about imagination and understanding. Thanks for the reminder, DFW.
"The next real literary “rebels” in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles. Who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue. These anti-rebels would be outdated, of course, before they even started. Dead on the page. Too sincere. Clearly repressed. Backward, quaint, naive, anachronistic. Maybe that’ll be the point. Maybe that’s why they’ll be the next real rebels. Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval. The old postmodern insurgents risked the gasp and squeal: shock, disgust, outrage, censorship, accusations of socialism, anarchism, nihilism. Today’s risks are different. The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the “Oh how banal.” To risk accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Of overcredulity. Of softness. Of willingness to be suckered by a world of lurkers and starers who fear gaze and ridicule above imprisonment without law. Who knows. "
The above is from "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction," published in 1993. Similar to the last quote, this one deals with human understanding and sincerity, a lack of irony or duplicity in literary presentation. Given how long ago this was written, do you still think that sincerity is a risk for writers? And of course irony by itself isn't a negative thing, but irony for irony's sake, I would argue, takes us away from the real purpose of art and literature. Thoughts?
David Foster Wallace was a
chswimmer — July 1, 2011 - 01:22David Foster Wallace was a champion of moral writing. That is, always hyper-aware and concerned with his affect on the reader, he passionately sought to address what he saw as society's primary problems - addiction, the omnipresence of the media, individual versus collective freedom, religion's incompatability with living a modern, intellectual American life, and most of all solecism. He feared that if we, as Americans, continue down our current path of excess and egoism, we are all doomed to be "lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms. Alone at the center of all creation."
Early in his career, Wallace recognized that the current literary movement, Postmodernism, was ill-equiped to prvide answers to these issues. Postmodernism, as exlempified by its classic cadre of Pynchon, Gaddis, Barthelby, DiLillo, relies not just on metafiction, contemporary cultural allusions, and self-critical analysis, but it draws heavily on irony. Earlier in "E Unibus Plurame," he notes,
Irony, entertainig as it is, serves an exclusively negative function. It's critical and destructive, a ground-clearing. Surely this is the way our postmodern fathers saw it. But irony's singularly unuseful when it comes to constructing anything to replace the hypocrises it debunks... All U.S. irony is based on an implicit, 'I don't mean what i say.' So what does irony as a cultural norm mean to say? That it's impossible to mean what you say?
Wallace's greatest work, Infinite Jest, is primarily Postmodern in form, combining knowledge of diverse fields, an ambiguous and disparate narrative structure, and (some say) frustrating endnotes. However, in it he seeks to address the difficult issues noted above, not by attacking them using irony or pedanticism, but by creating moral ambiguities and double-binds that constrain and lead the reader to his own answers.
With its publication, Wallace was hailed as the foremost in the vanguard of a new literary movement known as post-Postmodernism, or perhaps more fittingly, the New Sincerity. Wallace was clearly ahead of the pack. His writing was always moral; he was always afraid of leading the reader astray. I think that there is a sense by most literary authors that it is not enough to merely be iconoclasts, to poke fun. We are in a turbulent age, and writers and intellectuals have a duty to be leaders and visionaries. I hope that even after Wallace's last work is published his influence will lift others to continue to help us find answers to his questions.