James Ryerson, in an essay on David Foster Wallace’s college philosophy thesis (posted by the always-astute Greg Brown). This is a brilliant point.
I like Wallace very much, but I think any honest critical appraisal of his work must admit that this tension was not necessarily one deliberately enacted (and therefore performative, artistic, or creative), but indeed one he couldn’t escape; perhaps none of us can escape it in this era. The question then becomes: was it a strength or a weakness?
I don’t think that in admitting our favorite artists have weaknesses we do them a disservice; indeed, pretending otherwise is to perpetuate a hagiographical fiction that precludes real understanding of their work. That they struggled with foundational weaknesses is what made their art purposive; it is the source of much of it, I think.
At times, I felt that Wallace was very desperately attempting to overcome through co-option the problem of how “abstract thinking” and “theoretical paradigms” negate or subsume “basic truths,” but unsuccessfully. After some of his stories, it seemed clear that this problem cannot be overcome through co-option; discussing the intrusion of ideology, intellectualism, and theory into our art by introducing them into our art to “enact” the problem is like trying to calm ourselves by discussing how nervous we are: sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.
I don’t know how this feature of our age can be overcome (if I did, I would be orders of magnitude smarter, and a writer); various tactics include the deliberate removal of theory from art leaving viciously irreducible corpses of prose, as in McCarthy, or the winnowing of the novel to only the most elegant shapes and sighs, as in Barnes or Kundera. I’m sure other tactics abound: lyricism, impressionism, minimalism.
But I think Wallace was right to recognize that most of these were retreats from the problem, and he was noble for choosing engagement instead; that such engagement sometimes weakened his fiction does not diminish the value of his efforts.
