Channelling Mr. Wallace

Horne wants me to start putting my ASU State Press articles on here and, as usual, I can't say no to him. I'll put up the ones that have already run in some sort of loosely constituted chronology - which means whenever I just get around to throwing them up, adding some pictures and clicking buttons.

David Foster Wallace, in “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” spends a good deal of time talking about the nature of television consumption and the effect it has on people. He presents, to us, that we’re being watched, a lot. Every time we leave the house, other eyes look at and judge us, wonder about us, he says. We’re aware, though, because we, too, stare and ogle at strangers on the subway, in their cars, on sidewalks and in restaurants. We watch and are watched in turn.

And some are better than others at being watched. Some can take the light of the stage, the prying eyes of a faceless crowd – and others can’t: they fail, flounder, at the thought of anonymous voyeurism. In the same way many of us fail miserably in front of the camera, the man with a clipboard encouraging us to ‘act natural’ (and us struggling to make that contradiction a reality), the same way many of us feel under the gaze of strangers, wilting in the heat of other humans.

Wallace describes the ability of those people who can stand the heat as “watchableness”; they appear “unself-conscious,” able to “bear the psychic burden of being around other humans.” While they may be a wreck internally, externally they’re able to operate as if under no pressure at all to live up to the expectations of others, of society – and regular self-conscious people decline to bear this burden.

According to A.C. Nielsen and Co., 99% of American households own a television and it is on six hours a day; the average American (in all households, television or not) watches nearly four hours of that total six. When we watch television, we see people who are unself-conscious, acting natural in front of millions of people who are gawking and gaping at their furniture. They possess the watchableness we only dream about. And the more television we consume, the more we’re convinced that, in Wallace’s words, “the most significant quality of a truly alive person is watchableness.” Bearing the psychic burden of others appears, to us, integral to the pursuit of a meaningful, human (i.e. social) existence.

As television consumption emphasizes our social liabilities, our individual realities become more unpleasant. Our self-consciousness is intensified after consuming daily reinforcements of our own inability to respond naturally under observation, four hours a day, twenty-eight a week, one hundred and twelve a month…you get the picture. This increasing self-consciousness makes reality more unbearable, and so we seek escape (perhaps, more escape). We desire other worlds, fantasies, places to which we can flee to get away from it all, our nagging wives, nagging jobs, distant children – everything; we escape, if only for thirty minutes.

And that’s the hook: we begin to escape from reality to television because television made reality more unpleasant. That repudiation of social contact, which originally led many of us to television, is exacerbated by it, so that we’re reliant more and more on television to help us escape. It’s the irony of ironies: the very object that prolongs our suffering eases it temporarily. It’s like a salve that reopens the wound as soon as it’s done working: there’s no restorative effect – it’s a tourniquet for the pain of self-consciousness, unwatchableness.

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Prose Ailment (Or Virus Or Disease Or Something)

My writing has been suffering lately, and not in terms of content and volume, but in terms of style. It's lacking that quality that used to make it sparkle. See? I just said "used to make it sparkle." That, if anything, is an indication that something is wrong.

What I mean is that my writing has become turgid; simple; unrealized garbage. My writing used to speak both in what it said and how it was said and now it seems to perform only the former. Gone are the days, it seems, when I would write in a way that would inform my topic, or inform something, anything. My prose is now simple, straight, direct, and lackluster. It's nearing obscurity and normality. Examples are abundant in the majority of my last 10 or so posts.

I don't think I'm the only sufferer of this disease - "inferior writing." I think it's a common disease (or virus or whatever; I'm no linguist, I won't attempt to identify it's biology) among writers in my generation (or, in my case, people who aspire to be writers). Lots of what I read has that quality where it could have been written by anybody, by some random person. I've no way of telling who authored most things I read, today, and that's bothersome.

Perhaps the reason things got this way is this: in an age of ever-increasing information volume-flux and the abundance of mediums through which to communicate and transfer this information, people are demanding, possibly subconsciously, writing that is more direct, straight, and narrow, writing that doesn't dance around a point for the sake of dancing, writing that doesn't speak in awkward sentences in order to further the point of the piece. People who read blogs and other mediums want prose that is easy to understand, easy to ready, and that gets to the point without meandering through the woods first, even if there's an intellectual and artistic purpose behind such meandering - for instance, the way I'm meandering and repeating myself in this paragraph in order to emphasize the antithesis of what I'm identifying.

People have no time for art, anymore, especially in writing. Writing is perhaps the most difficult art to consume appropriately, because it takes the most time. Or at least that's the pathology. People feel they can look at a painting, a drawing, a sculpture, whatever and get whatever there is to get in a relatively short amount of time, and then move on to the next victim piece. And the same can't be said for writing, which requires applied reading, thinking, and re-reading in order to comprehend whatever the hell is being said. It's much faster to look twice and three times at a piece of marble than it is to re-read Moby Dick. So folks don't have time, they say, to do "art writing" - which to their mind is anything not related to the media and the news.

For this reason, blogs, to attract attention and a healthily dispersed demographic, tend towards journalistic writing as opposed to artistic writing, which causes a decrease in the volume of good writing out there. And hence the explanation to my current prose woes.

As you've no doubt discovered, I've regained some of my prowess in this very blog post, but it all seems unnatural, a little off, somehow, to be writing fluidly and artistically after indulging in garbage newspaper script, a practice that came much too easily for me to be at all comfortable about the future.

The information influx, Total Noise to David Foster Wallace, is having a profound effect on everything, and we - I - keep discovering new consequents to its antecedents.

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This is Excellent

There's a great passage in a David Foster Wallace essay I'm reading: it's brilliant, funny, and truthful. The context is a discussion he's started about how contemporary fiction writers ((he wrote the essay in 1990) should respond to the reality that irony, once the sole reservation of the postmodern artist, is now squarely and completely in the hands of television. The explication of that sentence is rather long, and difficult - the essay is 60 pages and the book is 9x6, which means on regular 8x10 paper it would be somewhere in the vicinity of 46 pages - but it's only necessary to know that it's about writers reacting to the reaction to society. Got it? Cool. Here's what he said:

"One obvious option is for the fiction writer to become reactionary, fundamentalist. Declare contemporary television evil and contemporary culture evil and turn one's back on the whole spandexed mess and invoke instead good old pre-1960s Hugh Beaumontish virtues and literal readings of the Testaments and be pro-Life, anti-Fluoride, antediluvian. The problem with this is that Americans who've opted for this tack seem to have one eybrow straight across their forehead and knuckles that drag on the ground and really tall hair and in general just seem like an excellent crowd to transcend. . . most of us will take nihilism over neanderthalism."

What a lively way of calling Christian Conservatives neanderthals. And the essay, up to this point (I'm about 45 pages into it), has been extremely reserved and descriptive (i.e. non-prescriptive). So this interjection and actual prescription comes as 1) a surprise and 2) an instance of what appears to be a necessary truth.

Oh, and I guess this means I've started reading David Foster Wallace, after writing that post (my second or third, four hundred years ago) about his virtual nonexistence among my generation before his suicide (which catapulted him into the stratosphere of Rock Gods who've died [Hendrix, Morrison, Joplin, etc.] because, even at 46, he looked and talked like a Rock God - and committed suicide, all existentially and stuff). I've read a dozen of his essays, some short stories, and a speech or two - I haven't gotten to the novels, yet - and my only report is that he has, thus far, the most brilliant mind I've come across in a long, long while. Explanation is unnecessary - this guy is the shit.

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"Everyone else is doing it, so I mise well..."

David Foster Wallace: An Apparently Epic (and Unknown) Figure in Literature

I’m a well-read, intelligent 20-something who is preparing for a career in academia (through humanities, of course), and I had never heard of David Foster Wallace until he killed himself about a week ago. When he showed up on the bottom of front pages across the nation, I had no idea who the hell he was. Because of that, I didn’t bother to read any articles about him. But then there came the Great Barrage: every Op-Ed page in every newspaper, whether it was The New York Times or the college press, began receiving and publishing moving, vibrant, incredibly fascinating eulogies of the man. At this point, I had to figure just who the hell this guy was and why he took up so much space everywhere.

Well, turns out he’s considered the “most brilliant mind of his generation” and is widely considered a top 5 writer of his era, and he’s near the top of that 5. So just who is this guy, and why have I never heard of him?



It got me thinking about writers and how we come to know them. If it’s not through some novel that really tears it up on The Times bestseller list (say, Dan Brown, The DaVinci Code), then it’s because his writing has gone through the “system,” whereby it takes years, even decades, for the books to matriculate down into the realm of high school and college reading lists and curriculum. This process, though, seems to take forever. What the fuck? If this guy is really so brilliant, then why have all these intelligent college students never heard of him? It makes sense to say that it’s because he was only 46, he was a postmodern postmodernist (don't question; it makes sense), and his stuff has yet to earn the right to sit next to Jane Austen and Ernest Hemingway. It could take decades before a writer’s work secures that apparent “privilege.” So in that sense, it seems plausible that someone so brilliant has gone unnoticed by the multiple generations that came after him.



But then I wondered: by hanging himself, Wallace sprayed every newspaper, blog, and information-giving medium with eulogies on his behalf, articles detailing his life and times, and now thousands of 20-somethings all over the nation are putting his epic and monumental masterpiece (so I've been told) Infinite Jest on their reading lists. I know I did, and so did some of my friends. So, by ending his own life, in perfect concert with the themes that haunt his work, he has, possibly, skipped the normal waiting period for a writer of his caliber to merit that place next to Hemingway et al.

What if he planned this?

Yeah, I doubt it, though it would make for a good modern (postmodern?) update of The Death of a Salesman. Wallace, in his finest hour, achieved that part of the American Dream concerned with immortality by killing himself. How ironic. He achieved immortality by taking advantage of his own mortality. Genius.

Wallace committing suicide and therefore becoming immortal (logic!), along with possible premeditation, fits perfectly into the drama of literary rEVOLUTION. You had the moderns in the early 20th century doing all kinds of wacky things that defied convention (Ezra Pound! e.e. cummings!). And it only made sense that they should call themselves “modern” so as to make it even more clear that all that 19th century shit was obsolete and outdated.

Then, you had a rolling broil of movements, prominent especially in the 60’s; eventually they all got together and called themselves postmodern. They were a reaction against the reaction. The moderns reacted against the predominating view of things (19th century shit), and now the postmoderns were reacting against the predominating view of things (modernism; getting all this?).

Then came the 80’s and 90’s where people like David Foster Wallace and the other children of postmodernism needed something to react against. Initially, they couldn’t find anything, because it’s hard to react against the guys reacting against the guys making the original reaction. There’s so much reacting going on that it’s kind of hard to find your niche, your place in all that mess. But, being human, they found a way. They reacted against whatever was there, which happened to be the postmoderns. But they needed a name! Unfortunately, it seems they were too busy reacting against stuff to think of something good. Besides, you already had moderns and postmoderns, so what else is left? Thus was born what can only be described as postmodern postmodernism. Yes, that’s correct. A group of younger, cooler, postmoderns reacting against the older, more dead postmoderns.



When the triviality and nonsensical nature of all this becomes clear, it is easy to see that Wallace’s suicide fits right in. Nothing makes sense, life is bullshit; fuck it, I’m out of here.

So the question arises: was David Foster Wallace merely fulfilling his post-postmodern destiny of saying, definitively, that life is absolute trash? Possibly, for when he killed himself, he made his point a little better than all the other guys who just wrote about it. It’s like the difference between Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau: Emerson talked a lot of crap about living in nature and being one with the transcendental oversoul, but Thoreau went out in the woods and fucking did that shit. He lived in nature and attempted to communicate with the oversoul. He had no idea how to do that, but he fucking tried, alright? Obviously, he failed, and more often than not he came into town to steal food from people, but at least he gave it a go. And so, while all the other post-postmoderns were relaxing in their tenured professorships, David Foster Wallace was out there, on the front lines, committing suicide. That’s real, man.

In any case, Wallace was a nobody to me nine days ago and now he’s famous. I imagine this event doesn't help the cause of those trying to persuade others that suicide is not the path to immortality. "Fuck that," Wallace says, "I’m dead and famous. Immortality, bitches."

And that right there is logic, folks. I would say Rest in Peace, Dave, but I'm sure if he could, he'd punch me right in the mouth.

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