“What are we learning when we discover that someone was not good”

July 5, 2023 2:16 PM

We knew he was not benevolent exactly (well, some of us knew) but there was the sense that he was suffering on the same side as us. Why we believed we were reading him for moral instruction in the first place I have no idea, but it did prefigure the primary way we construct morality now: to be paying attention. To everything. That means you.

–Where be your jibes now? is an essay by MeFi’s own Patricia Lockwood about David Foster Wallace.
posted by Kattullus (44 comments total)

This is a great essay. An insightful and complicated read of a problematic man, with lots of great riffs.

my favorite bit: Time​ will tell who is an inventor and who is a tech disruptor. There was ambient pressure, for a while, to say that Wallace created a new kind of fiction. I’m not sure that’s true – the new style is always the last gasp of an old teacher, and Infinite Jest in particular is like a house party to which he’s invited all of his professors. Thomas Pynchon is in the kitchen, opening a can of expired tuna with his teeth. William Gaddis is in the den, reading ticker-tape off a version of C-Span that watches the senators go to the bathroom. Don DeLillo is three houses down, having sex with his wife. I’m not going to begrudge him a wish that the world was full of these wonderful windy oddballs, who were all entrusted with the same task: to encompass, reflect, refract. But David, some of these guys had the competitive advantage of having been personally experimented on by the US military. You’re not going to catch them. Calm down.
posted by chavenet at 2:41 PM on July 5, 2023 [14 favorites]

The rest is Don DeLillo played at chipmunk speed.

The White Noise of Infinite Jest
posted by clavdivs at 2:50 PM on July 5, 2023 [7 favorites]

^ that was my second-favorite line ^
posted by chavenet at 2:58 PM on July 5, 2023 [4 favorites]

it's good to know i wasn't the only one who gave up on "infinite jest" after 150 pages.

actually, though, lockwood is just the kind of GOOD WRITER we need to remind us not to venerate the BULLSHIT ARTISTS.
posted by graywyvern at 3:16 PM on July 5, 2023 [10 favorites]

I am also a religious refugee from tornado alley, and I love how Lockwood can put so much hate and love side by side in a single sentence, with enough humor to emulsify it into some bizarre structure that entertains, edifies, and points the way to something better. Her writing is a key to how to live sanely in our universe. Will read this three times and then tell my local DFW heads that of course I’ve read the Pale King, the parts that matter at least.
posted by q*ben at 3:24 PM on July 5, 2023 [3 favorites]

I agree with Lockwood that Wallace was at his best as an essayist, and (of course, her words are better than mine) maybe at his worst as a person existing with other people in the world, or maybe as a person doing anything, written or otherwise, with women.

Also:

(Obetrol was later reformulated as Adderall. It was Andy Warhol’s drug of choice, and it literally does make you want to sell a soup label to someone for a million dollars.)
posted by box at 3:38 PM on July 5, 2023 [4 favorites]

Men read David Foster Wallace.

I've admittedly not finished this article, but as a woman who really loved Infinite Jest, with many female friends who also loved Infinite Jest, any article that rehashes this claim, without citation, that DFW was an author for men always loses me (much like the endless Bernie Bro complaints).

Totally fine if not everyone likes it! And it's disappointing that he was not a very good person, to say the least. But I'm not sure why so many people seem compelled to spend so much energy elegantly trashing writing that brought many people delight and entertainment.
posted by coffeecat at 4:02 PM on July 5, 2023 [41 favorites]

I know it's tangential to the main topic, but I cannot stop thinking about "some of these guys had the competitive advantage of having been personally experimented on by the US military". Is Lockwood talking about a specific writer here (and if so, who?) or is it a broad generational reference?
posted by ALeaflikeStructure at 4:23 PM on July 5, 2023 [1 favorite]

Is Lockwood talking about a specific writer here (and if so, who?) or is it a broad generational reference?

Probably a sidewise reference to Pynchon, confounding his actually military service with his psychedelic depictions of military experience in Gravity's Rainbow.
posted by mr_roboto at 4:35 PM on July 5, 2023 [2 favorites]

Is Lockwood talking about a specific writer here (and if so, who?)[...]

This was famously true of Kesey, so that might be the reference.
posted by kickingtheground at 4:36 PM on July 5, 2023 [2 favorites]

coffeecat: any article that rehashes this claim, without citation, that DFW was an author for men always loses me

The sentence you quoted is part of a preamble to a description of Lockwood’s own reading of Infinite Jest. For what it’s worth, I didn’t take it to mean that only men read Wallace (she mentions several other female readers of his work), much like not everyone went to see the Blue Man Group. She is evoking a stereotypical view of the first decade of this century.
posted by Kattullus at 4:57 PM on July 5, 2023 [7 favorites]

All throughout you can feel him, like, worrying about his seed. Whether he’s living up to his potential, to his regional titles, bending and trimming himself like a boy bonsai, sleeping at night with his talent in a pair of vaselined gloves. There is something grinding and awful and wrong in this, the same thing he observes in his essay about the young tennis phenom Tracy Austin: that there is something unnatural in watching a human being shape their mind and body so completely to a task. But then there’s the moment where he does – live up to it, I mean. ‘Here is how to avoid thinking about any of this by practising and playing until everything runs on autopilot and talent’s unconscious exercise becomes a way to escape yourself, a long waking dream of pure play.’ I am saying this as much to myself: to really be read you have to admit that you’re playing an even match. And he could have really had it, so why all the rest?
posted by grobstein at 4:58 PM on July 5, 2023 [3 favorites]

I wouldn’t say to my knowledge that Kurt Vonnegut was personally experimented on by the US military, but his experiences certainly did a number on him.

But if he had any influence on Wallace’s writing style, I can’t really see it, so yeah, probably not him.
posted by box at 5:05 PM on July 5, 2023

This was an exhausting read.
posted by leotrotsky at 5:21 PM on July 5, 2023 [9 favorites]

I've admittedly not finished this article, but as a woman who really loved Infinite Jest, with many female friends who also loved Infinite Jest, any article that rehashes this claim, without citation, that DFW was an author for men always loses me (much like the endless Bernie Bro complaints).

I'm at a point where I can't engage with DFW-for-Men stuff, but I did finish the article. My main takeaway was confusion about how she was sitting so that the book was digging into her pussy. In my pre-Kindle life of reading hefty books, I'd never had that happen, so I had to stop reading and try it out, admittedly, using a copy of The Power Broker because my Infinite Jest (signed) is in storage.

The use of "we" in essays like this is exhausting as well, but the humidity has left me too enervated to pull out all the "we" quotes that annoyed me.
posted by betweenthebars at 6:10 PM on July 5, 2023 [8 favorites]

There is a great deal of handwringing about whether we can still enjoy the work of hideous men… [or more precisely] whether we can still experience it without becoming these men.

Of course we become them. That is the exercise of fiction. If they were powerful, we become powerful. If they had the words, we have the words…

You open the text and it wakes. This is the thing that cannot be killed… What is alive in it passes to the living. His attention becomes our attention… Do with it what you will.

Patricia Lockwood is a gift.
posted by sixswitch at 7:23 PM on July 5, 2023 [9 favorites]

This was an exhausting read.

as compared to infinite jest?

i've read it - i didn't understand what the purpose was - he seemed to be very smart and creative and seemed to be unable to stop showing it off constantly

but that was the 20th century, when we still thought that we could transcend and change history with clever words that would lead us past the banalities of our lives and cultures - the problem is that kind of paradigm changing breakthrough hardly ever happens - and at some point, he gave up on it, if he'd been serious about it at all, and just piled the crap higher and higher - it was entertaining and sometimes engrossing crap, but it was still crap

maybe it was a parody of the kind of book i'm thinking it was

i mean what was that all about? i read it once - i'd always meant to read it again someday, but i guess i won't now, as i seem to have gotten rid of my copy

i'm getting the feeling that the culture as a whole is letting this book go like i did - an interesting, even memorable experience that didn't seem to be that valuable or enlightening and was forgotten about as more important things came up
posted by pyramid termite at 8:16 PM on July 5, 2023 [5 favorites]

My main takeaway was confusion about how she was sitting so that the book was digging into her pussy

Yes, I found that point confusing as well (seems like holding a book that way would strain the neck?), as well as her remark that "one can only think this was by design." This means what? The she thinks DFW wanted the book to hurt people, or worse, specifically women? And if that's not her intent, why put it like that?

I'm also a bit perplexed by:

We recognise it as grotesque because it is grotesque: a book that will not let you read it. I’m not speaking of the length, or the timelines that Wallace himself couldn’t untangle, or the footnotes

So why exactly does she find it unreadable? If I'm reading her correctly, it drove her "crazy" because she felt like she became DFW while reading it? Because in her experience, "All throughout you can feel him, like, worrying about his seed."? These are genuine questions - that's why she doesn't like it?

I'm also curious why she feels she wasn't the "intended reader" or who she thinks the intended reader was - DFW acolytes?

Anyway, I certainly can't argue with how anyone experiences a book, but like betweenthebars puts it, I can argue that an individuals experience/read of a book is not universal. I read Infinite Jest roughly a decade ago, and feel relatively confident in my memory of it that my experience was nothing like Lockwood's, which again, is fine - what's frustrating though is she provided very little details as to what her views/opinions are based on - she just states them as universal facts that must be obvious to all who have read the book. I guess I don't count as a "modern reader" ? (yes, there is one paragraph where she points out certain word choices she doesn't like for some, ineffable reason)

(Side note: I should maybe clarify that by "not finished" I meant that at a certain point I started to skim, though I did get to the end.)
posted by coffeecat at 8:29 PM on July 5, 2023 [4 favorites]

Patricia Lockwood is a good deal better read than I am, and a better writer than I will ever be.

She and I both took a certain amount of enjoyment from "The Pale King."

That much, I understand.
posted by your postings may, in fact, be signed at 8:59 PM on July 5, 2023 [1 favorite]

So why exactly does she find it unreadable?

I liked her metaphor of DFW, as an author, creating impossibly bad weather so he could have something to play through.

I’m more familiar with this, uh, “expressiveness through challenge level” in a performance context, having worked with a great choreographer who delighted in making work that forced its dancers to make strong decisions about what steps to emphasize and which to elide, because it was impossible to include them all in an evenhanded (and thus bland) way.

But raising the difficulty bar for oneself as an artist — through constraints, or formal structures, or private games — also raises the difficulty level for one’s audience. I appreciate Lockwood’s description of a book that wants to be unreadable except by the most committed, heroic readers.

We probably all know people who put up huge interpersonal barriers that actually serve as filters — who want to be loved, but only by The One, who is Special Enough to break through them.
posted by sixswitch at 9:20 PM on July 5, 2023 [10 favorites]

I see a certain impulse, when people get good enough at creating some form of art, that they want to create an opus. Something that shows they can do everything in every particular. Mostly this is impossible. Technology now underlies art, and mostly to complete anything really impressive you either need the help of others or else you need to become a soloist, a virtuoso. Even then the soloist is clearly focused, and could not pick up a different instrument and do it again. But the virtuoso writer can crib from so many things and spend so much time putting a piece together they can almost pretend they can do anything. I think DFW gave this a very good go with Infinite Jest, especially in a pre-internet era. All this information, the book so long and not even finished when you run out of pages. How could it be done? I was certainly captured by it, even fifteen years after its release and the internet quite familiar.

But I like the Pale King better now. I've actually reread it.
posted by solarion at 10:00 PM on July 5, 2023 [1 favorite]

I mean, I think the thing that Lockwood contends with over and over again in this essay is that, at times, David Foster Wallace really was that good, and at other times he was a self-mythologizing narcissist who was really full of how that-good he was. At times, he had brilliant things to say; at times, he was doing a "guy with brilliant things to say" voice. Sometimes his work has a powerful moral bent; sometimes it's the preaching of Yet Another Guy who feels like he has something to teach you about morality.

There's no clear divide. The two are inseparable. The anecdote about IRS agents getting a new social security number leapt out to me: how at first it's just such a striking detail, really makes you think, huh, and then it turns out that that's not true at all, but maybe it's the idea of that being true that's really provocative? Or the fact that it could be provocative that is itself thought-provoking... only now you're caught up in an ouroboros that frankly is somewhat DFW-esque.

That's the tricky thing about DFW's legacy, for me (a philistine who loved his non-fiction and continues to re-attempt Infinite Jest once every two years, but still thinks it's kinda garbage). There's a kind of inextricable entanglement to his work: it's not just that the idea of DFW makes it hard to contend with the actual DFW, it's that DFW himself was so hyper-conscious about who he, DFW, either was or could be or wanted to be or wanted you to think he was that, to my mind, it infects virtually every single thing he ever said or did.

His article about the cruise he took, which I've reread countless times for the sheer enjoyment of it, is a phenomenal case in point. From the very start of it, he positions himself as smugly above it all, cattily and kind of meanly, only he's also clear that there's some kind of moral rot afoot, something that disturbs him and his sensitivities to Worlds Gone Wrong. Only, at the same time, he's humble, so humble, he knows he's not really above it all, that kind of elitism is itself a part of the rot he's describing... but he's aware of that fact, which really makes him humble after all?? Much humbler than other people really. And by the way, other writers get paid to write entertaining promotional material about cruises, like sell-outs, and have you ever considered that there's more to writing than simple entertainment? Yet at the end of the day, the reason I've reread that essay so many times is that it's really fucking entertaining, precisely because it's catty and petty and mean and sometimes tries to say things about society (and sometimes maybe succeeds). But even when he does throw out a fascinating insight, it feels like he underlined it three times and wrote "FASCINATING INSIGHT" in the margins—and sometimes he writes that in the margins of some prose that really isn't fascinating at all, it's just priggish and dreary.

Was it an intentional byproduct of his style, or was it a byproduct of who he was? Both, I think—and again you can't really separate the one from the other. Just like you can't separate the extent to which he was a real piece of shit to women, both IRL and in his prose (and sometimes about IRL women in his prose) from his work. Only, at the same time, you can't entirely reduce his work to that facet of him either, because it's not like he was just that.

Lockwood's essay feels like it was written in a similar superposing manner to Wallace himself. The point, I guess, is that Wallace both was and wasn't exactly what he was. He both did and didn't anticipate the literary and technological era that followed him. (Well, he didn't really anticipate it, but the big thing about our cultural era is its un-anticipatability, which he did anticipate. Or maybe it's that "unreliability of authority" is the theme of our modern times, so by becoming a giant authority figure who now feels utterly unreliable, he does in fact embody the... you know what, never mind.)

It's impossible to reconcile—that is, impossible if you attempt to reconcile things the way that Wallace tried to reconcile them, by computing them all into a single comprehensive whole (which Wallace also knew was impossible). Which is why Lockwood ends where she does: ultimately, Wallace's work is the impact it leaves on you when you read it, the way you feel about it, every possible reaction you have as it encounters you. No, those responses won't add up to some singularly comprehensible sum total, and they never will; that's both the legacy DFW left behind and it's one of the central themes of his work. You could be a little pompous and call that theme the death of the author as easily-summed literary figure, just as Infinite Jest is either a Great American Novel or the death of the Great American Novel.

And, as always, it's hard to separate how much of this is "really" the case and how much of it was just what Wallace wanted to be the case. It's hard to separate the "real" art from the hypnotist convincing you that you've encountered his art. Because the hypnotic experience of art is the art, sometimes—maybe because art is always just that, hypnosis, and maybe just because a lot of so-called great artists were only ever hypnotists. (You can substitute "marketing" for "hypnosis" and this all remains true: was Wallace a great artist or was he a great marketer of Wallace-as-artist, and at what point can you no longer differentiate between the two?) Whether intentionally or accidentally, it is difficult to reckon with Wallace in any way, shape, or form without reckoning with this stuff.

Personally, I'm kinda glad I never bought wholly into the DFW hype. I was a little bit too young to catch him at his peak, and the culture I grew up with always felt a lot more interesting than the detached and overblown ways that he seemed to write about that same culture. At times, both he and his reputation irritate the shit out of me. Yet I also find myself quoting a handful of things that he wrote semi-frequently—not the big wham lines, just little observations here and there that lodged their way into my head. At my most irritable, it feels like the things I hate about his writing style feel of a piece with the shittiest things he did to other people, as if his literary flaws and his moral flaws were one and the same. But that's not quite true either, is it? At least, it feels like it can't be true, or shouldn't be true.

Maybe, in the end, I'm just grateful that DFW isn't the end-all be-all of modern literature. The less relevant he feels, the more I feel like I can appreciate him for what he did accomplish. Even if I can't quite get the ghost of his reputation out of my head, as I read him. (Or even escape the niggling feeling that he wants me haunted and possessed by his reputation.) But that feels like a DFW-esque paradox too: an experience that only truly happens when you escape the idea of having that experience, entwined with the fact that the experience itself births the idea of having it, making the idea impossible to escape from (up until you escape it, genuinely experience the thing itself, and entrap yourself in the idea of the experience all over again).

Lockwood captures that all really well, I think. Plus, for my money, she's a more delightful and less irritating writer than DFW ever was, and her excellent book (No One Is Talking About This) tackles similar ideas to the ones DFW covers at a fraction of the wordcount, which mathematically makes her both more efficient of a writer and a better bang for your buck. ★★★★☆
posted by Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted at 5:26 AM on July 6, 2023 [29 favorites]

see also The Last Essay I Need to Write About David Foster Wallace by Mary Holland.
posted by exlotuseater at 6:11 AM on July 6, 2023 [2 favorites]

Yep. DFW was both a genius and pretentious. His non-fiction is often unqualified brilliance, while his fiction is often, uh, kinda qualified. Infinite Jest is full of great writing passages, but it's also full of post-modern distancing devices ("filters" described in a comment here) that complicate the whole story without really adding much depth.
posted by ovvl at 6:34 AM on July 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

I love, love, love Patricia Lockwood's writing, but just to enthusiastically co-sign coffeecat's comment.
posted by unicorn chaser at 6:58 AM on July 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

I found this insightful and hilarious, thanks for posting. Though yeah, I don't generally have problems with positioning my books the way she seems to.
posted by rabbitrabbit at 7:27 AM on July 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

Out of context, but can anyone decipher this sentence?

“It was on its way to being good – in a Mister Squishee truck, on a rural highway, with a long fertile streak out the window.“

This is where I stopped reading.
posted by Don.Kinsayder at 8:01 AM on July 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

Lockwood’s a poet first, and this is a mediated, poetic image — like she’s describing a shot from a film or TV show. The camera sweeps in and follows an ice cream truck tootling down a two-lane country road, green fields on both sides. (This is not a high speed train racing to its destination.)

The book was on its way to being good, but it didn’t have a fixed or confident idea of where exactly its destination was or how to get there. And it wasn’t moving fast, or even in a vehicle designed for moving fast.

The book was on its way to being good, but its construction made that an indirect and somewhat incongruous goal.

Ice cream trucks live in cities, where there are people who want ice cream. Who is this truck’s audience and why has the driver placed himself so far away from them?

“Fertile” is a bit of a double joke. A) a fecal echo, but also B) stop driving the dumb truck in the wrong place and go harvest something that’s right there next to you!
posted by sixswitch at 8:40 AM on July 6, 2023 [6 favorites]

Out of context, but can anyone decipher this sentence?

Just references to Wallace's work. "Mister Squishee" is a well know early short story. I believe the rural highway is simply a reference to the text of The Pale King itself.
posted by mr_roboto at 8:41 AM on July 6, 2023 [2 favorites]

Oooh, thanks mr_roboto.

Also, there’s often an bit of skeeviness or sus-ness attached to ice cream truck drivers (as there is with many male-coded professions that involve interactions with children).
posted by sixswitch at 8:45 AM on July 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

I was one of those dudes who read Infinite Jest twice back in the day, and thought it was the literary fiction equivalent of SF's Neal Stephenson: both brilliant and boring, in great need of an editor with a hacksaw, really problematically sexist in a way that wasn't immediately obvious. I'd long outgrown Wallace and can't imagine reading the book today—but if this essay did anything, it's to convince me that Wallace deserved a second look. Wow, this was painful.
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 9:20 AM on July 6, 2023 [2 favorites]

i'm getting the feeling that the culture as a whole is letting this book go like i did -

I'm guess I'm just old enough to have completely missed Wallace in general, Infinite Jest in particular (certainly in terms of having it show up on my personal looking-for-good-books-to-read radar), yet not old enough to have someone younger impose its importance on me.

By which I mean, I guess I'd heard of the guy before he ceased to exist, but that's as far as it went. Never read a word. Still haven't really. The odd excerpt here and there, an interview or two. I did see the movie. It didn't bore me but I also felt a little embarrassed for all involved. Not to mention relieved that despite all my efforts nobody has ever taken me that seriously (artistically, that is).

I suppose a contributing factor in all of this bemusement had to be the Don Delillo comparisons that tended to pop up. Because Delillo, I gave a lot of time to, including Underworld (aka a whole lotta beautiful/brilliant prose in service of nothing in particular, narratively speaking). Never again, I finally decided. Life's too short. If you want me to read your big thick book, give me a big thick story, not just a bunch of riffs and recursions and reflections and refractions ... and other stuff that doesn't even begin with "r".

But (and this is a big but), I do have a tendency to be completely wrong about certain things culturally speaking. Relevant current case in point, Steely Dan whose first album I dug as reasonably smart thirteen year old way back when it was new, but then they lost me with all the jazzism and sophistication to the point of loathing by the time Aja hit. My loss, I'm now realizing. Also Cheap Trick who I wrote off as teeny bop juniors around the same time, yet here I am now, summer of 23, loving the depth of their discography (except some of those 1980s misfires). Seriously, if you haven't heard The Summer Looks Good on You from two years back, you're still short of actualization.

My overall point being ... something to do with both respecting and being wary of the zeitgeist, I guess, always a fascinating yet hungry beast. Get too close to it and you're at serious risk of being eaten. And then to add insult to injury, future folks will look back at you with a sort of horrified curiosity and wonder what the hell you were even thinking ... wearing those pants, sporting that haircut, loving that band, wasting yrrr writerly talents on all that density of prose.

William Burroughs once said that the real heart of his work was his need to escape the horror he'd made of his life (ie: only he could get himself out and all he had was writing). And the thing is, you could say he succeeded. He survived to live a long strange life and die a wise old man (four-score-and-three years). Which makes me wonder if Wallace effectively did the opposite -- he wrote himself into the horror. Almost Lovecraftian.
posted by philip-random at 9:51 AM on July 6, 2023 [2 favorites]

I suspect that DFW is one of those people who can hit completely different depending on what particular set of filters you have; Lockwood's filters seem to be much more complicated than I'd suspected, and this essay contains some biographical details of hers that I had no idea about going in. I guess that I'd seen her mostly as a humorist before, and the first paragraph, with the book that DFW should have written, seemed much more in line with what I'd expected from her than most of the rest of this piece. I guess that's more about my filters.

My filters WRT DFW were that I read most of Infinite Jest in a bar during my last year or so of alcoholism, and thus was paying much more attention to the parts set in rehab and much less to the tennis shit; after I got sober, I took another whack at it, and couldn't get into it at all, and gave up on him entirely after hearing Mary Karr on Fresh Air say that he used the real names and stories of real people that he met in rehab. Basically from then on, he and his corpus of work can fuck right off the planet as far as I'm concerned. Lockwood did acknowledge some of their relationship, but I found it curious that she didn't make the connection with Karr in something of DFW's that she quotes very early in the essay: ‘Given the way the human mind works, it does tend to be small, sensuously specific details that get remembered over time – and unlike some so-called memoirists, I refuse to pretend that the mind works any other way than it really does.’ If he's talking about someone besides Karr, who's known for her memoirs, it's not obvious.
posted by Halloween Jack at 11:32 AM on July 6, 2023 [5 favorites]

philip-random: I think you're onto something. Wallace wrote a little thing about Kafka that I think about a lot, both because it's quite piercing and because the ending of it describes Wallace himself as much as it describes Kafka:

It is this, I think, that makes Kafka's wit inaccessible to children whom our culture has trained to see jokes as entertainment and entertainment as reassurance. It's not that students don't "get" Kafka's humor but that we've taught them to see humor as something you get—the same way we've taught them that a self is something you just have. No wonder they cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke—that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home. It's hard to put into words up at the blackboard, believe me. You can tell them that maybe it's good they don't "get" Kafka. You can ask them to imagine his art as a kind of door. To envision us readers coming up and pounding on this door, pounding and pounding, not just wanting admission but needing it, we don't know what it is but we can feel it, this total desperation to enter, pounding and pushing and kicking, etc. That, finally, the door opens... and it opens outward: we've been inside what we wanted all along. Das ist komisch.

Comparing Wallace to DeLillo, I think, is extremely accurate—they're both insufferable in the same kind of way, and their senses of humor both tend to read more like the concept of something funny than like actual jokes. But Wallace also has a lot of Pynchon's whimsy, which means there's another kind of possibly-insufferable in the mix but that he does, in fact, just flat-out say funny, silly things, when he forgets not to. Honestly, my feeling has always been that his "greatness" is incidental to why he's popular: he's popular because he's capable of being a really fun read, and he's endured because he insisted on enjambing the funny stuff with a kind of groping towards infinity that may or may not land.

I mentioned his cruise essay (PDF warning) as one of my favorite reads of his. It's got a lot of the DeLillo style of "let me see how long of a list I can make out of things" humor, but it's also capable of being really smart in a sorta breathless, casual, down-to-earth way that almost feels like a stand-up routine. The last line of this tidbit, for instance:

Of the Megalines out of south Florida there's also
Commodore, Costa, Majesty, Regal, Dolphin, Princess, Royal Caribbean, Renaissance, Royal Cruise Line, Holland America, Cunard, Norwegian Cruise Line, Crystal, and Regency Cruises. Plus the Wal-Mart of the cruise industry, Carnival, which the other lines refer to sometimes as "Carnivore." The present market's various niches—Singles, Old People, Theme, Special Interest, Corporate, Party, Family, Mass-Market, Luxury, Absurd Luxury, Grotesque Luxury—have all pretty much been carved and staked out and are now competed for viciously. The TNC Megaship cruiser is a genre of ship all its own, like the destroyer. The ships tend to be designed in America, built in Germany, registered out of Liberia, and both captained and owned, for the most part, by Scandinavians and Greeks, which is kind of interesting, since these are the same peoples who have dominated sea travel pretty much forever. Celebrity Cruises is owned by the Chandris Group; the X on their three ships' smokestacks isn't an X but a Greek chi, for Chandris, a Greek shipping family so ancient and powerful they apparently regarded Onassis as a punk.

I can take or leave the first 75% of that—it keeps coughing self-importantly, for all it is a well-devised bit—but "a Greek shipping family so ancient and powerful they apparently regarded Onassis as a punk" has an extremely Internetty Patricia Lockwood sorta cadence to it. It's fun! It's a good time!

Similarly, occasionally his social critiques drop the loftiness and are just openly tender and vulnerable and unhappy. At one point, he writes,

An ad that pretends to be art is—at absolute best—like somebody who smiles at you only because he wants something from you. This is dishonest, but what's insidious is the cumulative effect that such dishonesty has on us: since it offers a perfect simulacrum of goodwill without goodwill's real substance, it messes with our heads and eventually starts upping our defenses even in cases of genuine smiles and real art and true goodwill. It makes us feel confused and lonely and impotent and angry and scared. It causes despair.

Which I think is a poignant and relevant remark even today.

What's always been frustrating to me is that he's always really good in the micro, but his macro is... fusty, the way DeLillo is. As a series of sharp little tidbits, I'll absolutely read copious volumes of his prose, because it keeps being this tightly-wound, but he typically makes all the salient points he's ever gonna make about a quarter of the way into his piece, and then keeps spinning; his points are never as profound as he makes them out to be, which is why I find his pithier lines more worth engaging with than his grandiose ones. (And probably why his most famous words came from a college graduation speech—a lowbrow medium literally defined by pith.) I always want him to just admit that he's a comic writer first and foremost, and to just spin a damn yarn, the way James Joyce did. But instead, he ties himself into formal knots as if to prove a point, and there's this overarching sense that he's illustrating something profound and disturbing just beneath the surface, only it all comes across the way that a super-noodly prog song does when it's taking 23 minutes and 46 bizarrely-named characters to insist to you that maybe, just maybe, we are all a little bit unhappy, on account of Society.

At some point, when I'd given up on ever just reading Infinite Jest front-to-back, I grabbed an ebook of it and treated it like a wiki: I'd find a thread of narrative that some essayist had mentioned, search for relevant keywords, and just read those snippets. Which is how I learned, somewhat infuriatingly, that there are passages of Infinite Jest that are tightly-written and are gripping and have actual suspense to them, just as there are mysteries buried in there that you can have a lot of Nabokovian fun teasing out. They just happen to be planted something like 600 pages into the book, and even then they're scattered about piecemeal—read through linearly, and you still run into random chunks that feel like the book equivalent of sketch comedy, only instead of "funny" they're weird dull pastiches of other styles that feel like Wallace trying (and failing) to show off. I can easily imagine coming away from reading that book with a bunch of cherished, dear little passages, almost like tiny secret coves that you discovered for yourself, but the more I try to read it, the more its entire approach feels wasteful and irritating.

All of this is highly subjective, obviously. But after a few years of struggling with DFW, I discovered Roberto Bolaño—another writer who loves dry, formalist humor and plots that never actually go anywhere—and was blown away by how much Big Literary Stuff he does while managing to be unbelievably gripping. The long sentences all feel honed to a sharp point; the anticlimaxes are planted in devious, explosive ways; even the noodling feels hilarious and ominous all at the same time. Wallace, by comparison, feels brilliant and insightful and hilarious in patchwork, but I always get the sense that there was something really uncomfortable and tortured about his process, some inner valve he just didn't know how to loosen, and it pervades everything he touches. Maybe I'm completely off-base by feeling like that thing he says about Kafka touches upon what that valve is, but that's always been my take: it's like he's relentlessly trying to escape his own demons, and the only way he knows how to do it is by indulging them and indulgent them and indulging them, and then he's disturbed to discover that they've gotten plumper and juicier in the process.

(YMMV, obviously. I'm probably not as qualified to opine on DFW as a diehard fan is, which is why I loved Lockwood's take on him so much. I'm also v here for the MeFi DFW brigade's takes—I have fond memories of reading folks talk about him here as far back as 2008, so at this point it's literally nostalgic.)
posted by Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted at 11:49 AM on July 6, 2023 [8 favorites]

I guess I'd count as a diehard fan, having read Infinite Jest probably half a dozen times over the last 25 years, and while I certainly feel as uncomfortable about his personal awfulness as I would about the personal awfulness of any artist whose work has meant a lot to me (John Lennon is rapping at the window), what makes DFW nonetheless compelling to me is exactly the kind of self-awareness that THCBT remarks on.

All the stuff about his pretentiousness and his look-at-me-ness and his obvious torturedness ... he knew all that about himself. He recognized and would likely have acknowledged, to a painful degree, all the criticisms aimed at him here and elsewhere.

That's why his work still resonates so deeply with me: He, more than any other author I've read, was able to capture the messiness and agony of being a particularly self-aware human at this period in history, and to both fight against and be unable sometimes not to indulge your worst impulses, and then to resent yourself for that inability, ad infinit.

And that's also why the metaphor of addiction, of being unable to quit something you know is terrible for you, works so well for me in his work, because it highlights the difficulty and sometimes impossibility of separating from yourself the deeply ingrown parts of yourself that you see (often wrongly, sometimes not) as essential to your self but also know are toxic.

It's that struggle I think of a lot when reading him, and also this line in a Gately section toward the end of IJ:

"He could do the dextral pain the same way: Abiding. No one single instant of it was unendurable. Here was a second right here: he endured it. What was undealable-with was the thought of all the instants all lined up and stretching ahead, glittering. ... He could just hunker down in the space between each heartbeat and make each heartbeat a wall and live in there. Not let his head look over. What's unendurable is what his own head could make of it all."

Maybe whether or not you like DFW's fiction depends partly on whether you can relate to that kind of involution and self-consciousness, or whether you find it wanky? Whether the idea of breaking the unendurable up into endurable seconds, and recognizing the dangers of relying on your own head, resonates with you? I know it does with me. YMMV.

(Aside: I read No One Is Talking About This and remember nothing about it, couldn't even give you a sentence on what it's about. Not intended as an indictment of Lockwood or the linked essay, but to underscore how personal one's reaction to literature is.)
posted by pwe at 1:15 PM on July 6, 2023 [4 favorites]

I guess that I'd seen her mostly as a humorist before

This is orthogonal, I know, but Lockwood famously savaged John Updike in the LRB: I was hired as an assassin. You don’t bring in a 37-year-old woman to review John Updike in the year of our Lord 2019 unless you’re hoping to see blood on the ceiling.
posted by Snarl Furillo at 1:29 PM on July 6, 2023 [9 favorites]

IJ:
"He could do the dextral pain the same way: Abiding. No one single instant of it was unendurable. Here was a second right here: he endured it. What was undealable-with was the thought of all the instants all lined up and stretching ahead, glittering. ... He could just hunker down in the space between each heartbeat and make each heartbeat a wall and live in there. Not let his head look over. What's unendurable is what his own head could make of it all."

This is just Marcus Aurelius, though: “ Do not disturb yourself by picturing your life as a whole; do not assemble in your mind the many and varied troubles which have come to you in the past and will come again in the future, but ask yourself with regard to every present difficulty: 'What is there in this that is unbearable and beyond endurance?' You would be ashamed to confess it! And then remind yourself that it is not the future or what has passed that afflicts you, but always the present, and the power of this is much diminished if you take it in isolation and call your mind to task if it thinks that it cannot stand up to it when taken on its own.”
posted by praemunire at 5:11 PM on July 6, 2023 [9 favorites]

Lockwood's essay feels like it was written in a similar superposing manner to Wallace himself.

I had this thought, too, when people were talking about her style earlier in the thread. She can be similarly contradictory and discursive (not just here) and even show-offey but her way of leavening it is with a wink and series of one-liners.

This is orthogonal, I know, but Lockwood famously savaged John Updike in the LRB

I wouldn’t call this one a straight savaging, either. The opening that you’re quoting is acknowledging that this is what people want from her, and she delivers some pretty incredible digs at him, but also admits to some affection for him.
posted by atoxyl at 10:41 PM on July 6, 2023 [3 favorites]

DFW catches a stray in the Updike one, too, via his famous savaging of (late-period) Updike.
posted by atoxyl at 10:55 PM on July 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

> But raising the difficulty bar for oneself as an artist — through constraints, or formal structures, or private games — also raises the difficulty level for one's audience.

i just like this juxtaposition with delany in kattullus's prior thread:

About Writing, on the other hand, is more like a matter-of-fact (though not unfriendly) but still quite demanding high school or college teacher, who's like, "Look, if you really want to write something good -- to do the best work you're capable of -- and why would you even spend the time if you're not going to be doing that -- then you should think about this. And this. And this. And you should probably weave together structural, tonal, and linguistic considerations, and create a tapestry of levels of organization that reflect and refract each other from multiple angles. I mean, do you want to really do this thing, or don't you?" After I read that book, I found the standards Delany set to be impossible to argue with or deny, and what I realized at that point was that I didn't want to be novelist after all, for the simple reason that I wasn't inclined to work that hard.

> No wonder they cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke—that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle.

man's inhumanity to man is (singularly?) human :P
posted by kliuless at 4:44 AM on July 7, 2023 [3 favorites]

I wouldn’t call this one a straight savaging, either. The opening that you’re quoting is acknowledging that this is what people want from her, and she delivers some pretty incredible digs at him, but also admits to some affection for him.

Yeah, Lockwood has never struck me as a "savage them" sort. Her pieces about this sort of writer feel more like someone coming to terms with a former loved one who hurt them dearly, trying to more clearly see both the places where love existed and the awful counterparts.

In fact, her piece about Updike is arguably more harsh, not just about Wallace, but specifically about Wallace's own savaging of Updike: "In the end Wallace loved the sinner, as Updike wanted us to love Rabbit Angstrom. And part of the problem with our 360-degree view of modern authors is knowing where to put any of it. Wallace’s vivisection of Updike’s misogyny seems calm and cool and virtuous, and then you remember that to the best of anyone’s knowledge Updike never tried to push a woman out of a moving car."

That part about the 360-degree view of modern authors feels like her thesis across these two pieces. As does the part where she specifically mentions "loving the sinner" as something that's close to, but ultimately quite different from, her own objective.
posted by Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted at 9:27 AM on July 7, 2023 [6 favorites]

Rereading the Updike one after it was linked here, I think that DFW review looms very large in the background - that may not be the only example she has in mind saying that people write well about him, but clearly it’s one of the major ones. And that review itself expresses some admiration of his early work, while lamenting his descent into self-parody.

(I think Lockwood did end up writing better about Updike than about Wallace but I like this one, too)
posted by atoxyl at 2:17 PM on July 7, 2023

By the way I think the more memorably incisive line from the DFW review of Updike is not “just a penis with a thesaurus” (credited to an anonymous someone else) but “when a solipsist dies, after all, everything goes with him.”
posted by atoxyl at 2:17 PM on July 7, 2023 [3 favorites]

Joanne O’Leary interviewed Patricia Lockwood about this piece for the LRB podcast. It clarifies a lot of points, as well as responding to some of the weirder reactions to the essay.
posted by Kattullus at 5:24 PM on July 24, 2023