This is something
that I started writing some time ago and I think that it has legs but
I lost track of it and just never finished it. As of now, I am not
interested in finishing this, but I want to post this because I think
that I make a few good observations here and it is hard to throw away
a piece of writing like this once it has begun. It's my blog, so
that's it.
Parts of this are a
little rough and some places I just leave off because I was just
jotting down notes. There is one point at the end that I will comment
on after the text that I have written.
So here it is,
another unfinished essay about David Foster Wallace.
Consider the
Author
I
have written a lot about the work of David Foster Wallace in my
academic career and elsewhere. He has always been something of a
problematic figure for me because there is a great deal of his output
that I have enjoyed but there has always been a kernel of something
that is at the heart of it that gives me pause. If this were a piece
of my academic work, I would take the time to work this all out ahead
of time and treat you to a thesis claim. But since you are reading
(maybe) this on my personal blog, I am going to write for exploration
and maybe figure out what I mean by the end of it.
There is something about Wallace's work that has started to chafe at
me. Still, there is much about his work that I enjoy, so I have
found this to be a difficult relationship. I have written about my
early experiences reading DFW elsewhere, but it bears repeating in
brief here.
When
I first read his work I hated it. I picked up Oblivion
on the recommendation of a friend (he didn't recommend this book in
particular, just that I read DFW's work and this is the one that I
selected). I hated it. The overly detailed exactitude of his
descriptions and the seeming lack of emotional depth turned me off
and I quit reading. After further coaxing I picked up
Infinite Jest and
struggled through reading it over the course of about 8 months. This
novel was less jarring in its minutiae than the stories in Oblivion
but I still just didn't get it, didn't like it. But I kept thinking
about. For the next two years I thought about that book and
discussed it with whomever I met who had also read it (even in my
doctoral program I found few who had made it through the whole of
it). I eventually picked it back up to read again and had a very
different experience. I loved the novel for a number of reasons.
There were parts of it that still rankled, but I like the the
experience of reading it and what it seemed to stand for. On that
first read-through I had missed a lot of the post-/anti-ironic
elements and I missed the true suffering that Hal faces. I, as I
found others would too, had misread the character and read Wallace's
descriptions of Hal's postmodern detatchment as endorsement rather
than diagnosis.
I
come to this point in my writing now because I have picked up DFW's
Consider the Lobster,
one of his collections of essays. The background here is that, with
the exception of Infinite
Jest, I have always
preferred Wallace's non-fiction to his fiction. This is going to
figure into my summation later. But what I noticed while reading the
first essay in this collection, “Big Red Son,” is that it just
drips with smarm.
“Big Red Son” is the first essay in the collection and it details
Wallace's attendance at the Adult Video News awards, porn awards.
While there are some amusing observations throughout, one really gets
the sense that DFW is congratulating himself throughout for the
edginess of covering this subject. Wallace attempts to give the
subject the serious treatment that he implies that it deserves while
simultaneously making fun of the people involved for their
earnestness in their profession and undercutting his reportage at
nearly every turn. Wallace's signature style is to insert himself
into his own journalism and he casts himself as a sort of gee-shucks
regular Joe that he does in much of
One of the big problems that emerges in DFW's work is a
self-assuredness in his perspective as some sort of “outsider.”
Wallace adopts a particular tone in which he assumes authority on
select topics because he is a combination of a) being young enough to
understand youth and youth perspective; b) being educated enough to
view this perspective critically while also tapping into
traditionalist views; and c) aware enough of the irony of the
confluence of these positions to comment on all of it. The
difficulty is that he then often writes himself into blind spots that
seem to confirm the negative assertions of his critics.
Let
me give you a specific example from the essay “Authority and
American Usage,” a review of a style guide that ends up a polemic
on English dialects and the role of proper English. I will note that
I do agree with much of what Wallace writes in this essay and it is,
overall, an extremely fine argument about the political role of
language as political and cultural signifier. In one aside, Wallace
strives to tell his reader what the problem of “politically
correct” language is. The problem, for Wallace, is that it amounts
to self-congratulatory virtue signaling on the part of the Left. But
Wallace seems to go out of his way to provide examples in bad faith,
referring to the poor as “economically disadvantaged” and
eventually “pre-prosperous.” His examples tend to follow in the
footsteps of many conservative critics who would demean “PC” by
just making things up that no one ever actually said and then
pointing at their imagined examples as subject of ridicule. This is
poor argumentation. But there is a more serious flaw. In the pages
leading up to this analysis, Wallace off-handedly uses the word “fag”
as
This
is where I ended it. I wanted to pick back up here because I remember
the point that I was moving toward and I think that it bears
finishing that thought, at least.
So
what rankled me about this is not that Wallace has a dislike for what
he calls PC language or that that he uses a slur in a denigrating
way. What bothered me then, and what I still think about, is that in
this essay that is supposedly about the political power of language,
Wallace ignores the power of language to damage and dehumanize
others. I don't think that he means to be hurtful by using the word
“fag” in such a way, but that is what he is doing. By not
thinking about his usage in this way, he participates and promotes a
homophobic agenda.
This
is disappointing because Wallace is typically a very thorough thinker
and this seems like a real gap in his reasoning that is surprising to
read now. It is also disappointing because Wallace is typically such
an empathetic writer.
