Coming to Terms w/
David Foster Wallace
 |
| <3 Federer (from www.justjared.com) |
I
first encountered David Foster Wallace (DFW) shortly after Roger
Federer won his 17th
Grand Slam title at Wimbledon on the 8th
of July 2012. One of my Facebook acquaintance posted a link to an article DFW wrote on the subject of Roger Federer back in 2006 (or,
in Federer's more sublime terms, 9 Grand Slams previously). I was,
and am, an absolute sucker for Federer, a devoted follower, an
acolyte, perhaps, in different circumstances, a groupie. He is, I
think, inarguably, empirically, one of the very few genuine geniuses
to have been alive during my own lifetime. Little did I know, when I
clicked the link on that fateful July day, that I would discover not
just a pleasant victory hymn once more lionising a well-acknowledged
legend, but an absolutely astounding essay, the start of a thread
that has lead me, belatedly, to the appreciation of one of the other
very few genuine geniuses I have shared this earth with.
One
of the nicer things I can say about DFW is that he's one of those
people you read sometimes who you desperately want to imitate. I
think of the part in The
Incredibles
when Mr Incredible is followed by a kid who wants to be his sidekick,
even though he has no superpowers. Realistically, if I could be DFW's
sidekick, I would be very happy. Because this seems unlikely, I've
mostly ended up semi-consciously speaking, writing, thinking a little
more like him. I've started to overuse w/r/t and w/ rather than with
respect to and with respectively. I've started to adopt all kinds of
extra equivocators in my prose, extra subclauses, extra information,
extra self-effacement, self-diagnosis, self-assessment; extra mixing
of high- and low- brow culture (although I think this
interest/addiction came earlier; it was certainly fed significantly
by The Simpsons);
extra brackets. This
actually-quite-interesting-but-a-little-self-contradictory article
points out DFW's “attempts
to ward off criticism by embedding all possible criticisms within the
writing itself.” I definitely now try to do this, reminding myself
of a character in one of DFW's own stories who tries to bluff his psychiatrist by anticipating and self-diagnosing his own
neuroses. In
the end, he (the character) outwits his psychiatrist, because he (the
character again) is such a grotesquely shallow, manipulative shiny
surface of a person that his facsimile self-exposition is all that
can be analysed about his character; the psychiatrist, of course,
doesn't realise that. Not just does he anticipate criticisms by
explicitly stating them in his prose; the plot here seems to
encapsulate the paradox within itself: the false mirage surface of
the character resists analysis because it offers self-analysis which
is in itself a shimmer on the horizon, precluding the very
possibility of any real
analysis, but totally revealing that it is aware that said real
analysis is not and never could be a real possibility. Fata
morgana
everywhere; it gets in your eyes while you read. (Obviously, I
haven't quite reached this level of meta-static all-encompassing
pseudo-self-revelation, but a boy can dream; obviously, I am enacting
a rehearsal of the embedding of all possible criticisms within the
writing itself right now; obviously, at the moment it is a little
crude.)
 |
| Mr Incredible's less incredible sidekick (from http://writeups.org) |
Which
all sounds horribly postmodern and complicated and unfun. Perhaps the
greatest achievement of DFW's anticipation of future critcisms is
that it makes allowance for the insidious but unavoidable problems
associated with postmodernism – that if the world, or at least the
work of art, is all surface, and surfaces are indistinguishable or
shallow or terrifying, what's the point of anything? D.T. Max's essay on DFW's biography (later expanded into the well-titled book Every
Love Story is a Ghost Story,
released last year) takes this as the jumping point for its central
argument w/r/t/ DFW: that he managed to escape from the postmodernist
mire, with a new sort of meta-sincerity. Max puts it a lot better
than I do.
The
whole point doesn't seem very controversial, to be honest. All you
have to do is read the aforementioned and mind-blowing essay on Roger
Federer. The DFW classics are all present, but the tone is not of
postmodern ironic jest, but of vast admiration and sincere fandom and
appreciation, the very tone that I hope to be striking right now.
Revulsion
 |
| DFW, looking friendly (from http://2.bp.blogspot.com) |
Unfortunately,
I think, after a few months of gestation, that I didn't quite get the
right Federer-essay-tone. Rather, what I have written seems gushing,
adolescent, pseudo-academic. Somehow, DFW seems to inspire it. His
flexible, loquacious, elongated, subtly modulating, colloquial,
conversational, equivocal tone inspires loyalty. But, more than that,
it inspires fondness, an almost personal appreciation for DFW. He
seems like your friend. But he seems like so much more than that, so
impossible to pin down. He seems like a really really smart guy, a
kind of hyper-literate polymathic role-model. He seems, most of all,
kinda nice. As far as I can tell from his biography, this isn't
strictly true. At the very least, he was a difficult man to live
with.
This
was going to be an article about my puppyish DFW enthusiasm, but,
after failing to finish it, it has transformed, several months
later, into something a little different. I haven't been reading any
of Dave's work in a while; what I have been doing, however, is
watching videos of him on youtube. The experience is alarming, it's
distancing, it's iconoclastic. Dave's aura may not be able to stand
being filmed; his groovy-guidance-councillor shtick – ironically,
best presented in his videoed commencement address shit, which is
ripe for Facebook quotation – just doesn't stick when you can watch
him actually speak. His nauseating anxiety, his greasy desire to be
liked, his lofty distance, they all come across in interview. What
if, in an age of internet access, people who write words – and who
have a lot of control over the words they write and how they are
presented – can't control their self-presentation? What if the
special relationship between author and reader is violated? (What if
you read about said author in gossip columns?) Since most everyone
I've read for years has been dead for decades, this whole minefield
is one I've only come to recently, and my relationships with any
contemporary authors are being actively mediated by my now
university-over-educated DFW-style hyper-self-conscious brain, and
I'm starting to sort of actively repulse from them, even as I
continue to be actively seduced by the Internet's promise of more and
more information, and end up reading shitty interviews with Ned
Beauman in the Oxford student newspaper by mistake at 2am on a
weeknight.
Most
professions in the public eye seem to have developed capable PR. If
actors, musicians, and presidents can seem
funny and human and humble through online media, why do authors
struggle? I should equivocate a little here: I don't follow all
authors at all times to make this statement comprehensive: rather,
some authors I have followed, or tried to follow, notably David
Mitchell, Ned Beauman, Michael Chabon, Zadie Smith, Lila Azam
Zanganeh, have very limited online presence. When they do appear, the
medium is either hyper-controlled, like Smith's occasionally and
often very good essays, or kinda lame. Never is there the
sense of honesty, of glimpsing the real person behind the mask of
publicity, that the best celebrities can offer. They want to make you
believe that they're normal people just like the rest of us;
sometimes they succeed, sometimes they seem to be trying too hard. For some reason today's literary authors don't seem
that interested in that. They want to keep their distance. They only
want to interact through their words, they only want to monologue at
you.
I
wonder if this is just a missed opportunity, an example of a fairly
technophobic & PR-suspicious part of today's media landscape
failing dismally to grasp new potential. Or if it reveals something a
little deeper, some kind of compulsive solipsism – probably the
case for Dave. Or, maybe a little more worryingly, if it's part of a
kind of elitism. Intellectuals are above the Internet. The Internet,
with its tweets and youtube self-parody videos and AMAs, is pop
cultural; literary writers are high cultural. The place of the
literary artefact is in the library, not on imgur, being mindlessly
upvoted amidst dozens of gifs of cats.
 |
| Geoffrey Hill: less friendly (from http://24.media.tumblr.com) |
This
thought first crossed my head a few days ago, when I went to see the
poet Geoffrey Hill speak in the lofty environs the Oxford
University's exam schools. Hill at his best is capable of imbuing his
poetry with a vast and deeply affecting empathy.
Hill as a public speaker is curiously old-school (to be fair to him,
he is now in his 80s, and probably isn't all that online). He speaks
with a booming, received-pronunciation voice, with occasionally
Worcestershire slippages. He emphasises raspingly; he often repeats
important phrases. He sounds a bit like a BBC radio announcer from
the mid-30s crossed with a cultist prophet and a thespian. He has a
Gandalf-beard. One thing he said has stuck in my head. Talking about
Beckett writing about Joyce (a fairly high-brow legacy), he said (I
paraphrase) 'there is a kind of arrogance to Beckett's essay that I
find pleasing in comparison with the mewling populism of contemporary
critics.' I found this strange. Should poets and critics and
novelists and commentators be arrogant? Are today's critics populist?
My own problem with them is that they aren't populist enough, for the
most part. They are happy with a small intellectual/academic niche,
and in-field respect. Anyone must be arrogant to some extent, I
think, to assert their opinions on the public, but not in Beckett's
way, with long untranslated passages of Italian citation (the
feature Hill approved of).
All
of which brings us back to Dave. DFW was certainly, in some ways,
arrogant; he was also an insecure mess. He was, self-proclaimedly, a
kind of snob, a grammar-nazi, unafraid of writing essays about modern
critical theory, and applying the same theories to essays about pop
culture; unafraid of writing long and difficult novels. At one level,
he is a good model for a combination of intellectualism and populism,
maybe one of the best the literary world has produced. And yet, at
the same time, he's an awful example to follow, alienating and
personally unpleasant, distanced from the positive interpersonality
of modern popular culture. I came to Dave through the Internet, I
researched him through the Internet, and I fell in love with him
through the Internet; and yet this was all, inevitably, tragically,
done without any of Dave's own involvement. He wrote the words; other
people, fans and afficionados, spread them for him. There's potential
there, someone just needs to figure out how to use it.
I fell out of
love with Dave through the Internet too.
***
DFW
apparently had a tattoo of his first love's name – Mary – on his
arm, and when they broke up he had the name crossed out, and when he
met his second love, he appended a footnote, further down his arm,
and the footnote had the name of his second love.
No comments:
Post a Comment