Showing posts with label David Foster Wallace. Show all posts
Showing posts with label David Foster Wallace. Show all posts

Saturday, November 27, 2021

DFW


 Some who admire David Foster Wallace assert that those who don't "get" him or are guilty of misunderstanding what he's doing as a writer. If they are missing the point so often over the entire length of his talk, the fault is not entirely theirs. DFW had a habit of reflexively resorting to a passive "ironic" tone when the ideas in his work piled up under the weight of his un-diagramable sentences, which is a handy way of getting a laugh and riffing on end.

His point, his warnings, his insights became nearly unnoticeable for all his showing off. If there is a disconnect between audience and speaker, Wallace shoulders much of the blame. He was a fascinating writer and occasionally brilliant, but his lack of emphasis when it counted did him no favors. He did so many digressions as a means of revealing what's behind the narrative curtain, analogous, I suppose, to the grand scene in Wizard of Oz as Toto reveals that the Great Legend is both social construction and a fraud, that the brilliance is made indistinguishable from the exuberant and chatty bullshit that glut Wallace's writing. Wallace couldn't resist the impulse to comment, dredge for ironies when natural contradictions didn't avail themselves, serve heaping amounts of what read like undigested research. It was such a massive dump of information that what he'd written in his fiction transformed from the precious element of "telling detail"--that bit of commentary on specific items in a room and the speech acts of characters revealing some submerged desire to contradict and flee the world they've created or have selected--into mounds of unconsidered data.This always struck me as a species of hording, if you will; perhaps he was a rigorous editor of his own material in ways unknown to us, far too much of his work reads like a man who couldn't throw out paragraphs or pages that didn't bring quality to the reading experience.

There's a "look-ma-no-hands" showiness about his books, Infinite Jest especially. I suppose that as one who has made his way through a bevy of Henry James, James Joyce and Thomas Pynchon novels, all thick, labyrinthian, very extended in their conditional constructions who managed both to comprehend (I think) and enjoy the deluges of word virtuosity, I guess it's ironic I'd find Wallace's prolix tiresome. Not really. The other three were (are) better writers who wanted their sentences to contain surprise and ideas while not sacrificing the providence of tale they were engaged in telling. I never thought Wallace graduated beyond the status of being a loquacious verbal show-off.

Friday, January 8, 2016

WRITING IT ALL DOWN UNTIL THE LEVEE BREAKS



Ted Burke
David Foster Wallace is an interesting writer who is in dire need of a vicious but fair editor. He notices everything that is odd and potentially wonderful of ponder in his world, but he's able to organize his perceptions; he lacks the ability to discriminate what's actually interesting to a reader from that which is worth only a smirk and a snort for himself. A Supposedly Fun Thing works, I suppose, because its nonfiction and the pieces are short, but even here he doesn't take advantage of the compression. He goes rather long too often, and what's wonderful about his writing and his intelligence is lost. It is really too much work to sift through the giddy semiotics to unearth the verbal gems. Barthes himself had the good sense too- be brief in the columns he wrote for the French popular press.  

Ted Burke
Infinite Jest is perhaps the most exasperating novel I've ever read, along with being the most chronically overrated in contemporary fiction. It may be argued that he novel is about the digressions he favors, and that such digressions place him in line as being the latest "systems novelist", taking up where Gaddis, Pynchon, DeLillo and Barth (John) have led the way, to which I'd say fine, and what of it? The AA and recovery material is potential good fun, and the aspect of powerlessness over a movie ought to be enough for a writer to mold a sure satire, but Wallace seems far too eager to surpass Gravity's Rainbow and The Recognitions in his long, sentences, most of which in retrospect gave you the sense of what Allen Ginsberg's referred to as the Box Car effect, the cars of a train rushing by at great speed and, for  a period, seem to be without beginning or end There is so much contained within, so many things mentioned, so many things half described and given half contexts for qualities that resonate only a little, it becomes intoxicating for a bit, dizzying for many, impressive in the author’s ability to fit so much detail of tangible things into so many long, sequential sentences and still, stay within the ever-expanding idea of what good grammar and construction happens to be.


Ted Burke
 There are those this shows genius and perhaps it does, but it is the sort of genius I respect and admiring for the sheer will to took to connect everything inside one’s complete set of pockets with everything fleeting thought and arcane that makes an appearance in casual chatter or the slight movement of a body part, the turn of the head, for example, or the flick of a cigarette ash from a nearly dead smoke. The closest I could go is that it resembles Henry James at best, with heavy seasoning provided by Thomas Pynchon and his own going themes of Systems of Meaning and Organization and how that turns the study of history (or even discussion of what one had for lunch) into a unfathomable inquiry that blurs the subject just by asking the questions. The element of not being able to decide the underlying meaning of a storyline on the molecular level , the level of the sentence coming into being as the writer attempts to put the ideas, one following the other , into an appreciable order is DFW’s biggest break through. He links everything in grammatically readable sentences, but there is deluge rather than word flow and, if you’re someone committed to finishing every book you started to read as I used to be, you are eventually weighed upon too much by information that turns out to be a distended set up for a joke and no longer mistake the linking of things for coherence. The aforementioned editor I proposed would have handed the manuscript back with the observation that this set of multi-channeled satires has already been done by the previously mentioned authors whose works are not likely to be matched. Said editor would then advise that over-writing isn't the sure means to break with your influences, but that developing one's own style is.


Friday, September 14, 2012

David Foster Wallace's grand failure

David Foster Wallace: the Death of the Author and the Birth of a ...David Foster Wallace was  sporadically,brilliant, verbose,an unrestrained word machine that seemed program to jump every rabbit hole and tar pit on his way to vaguely addressed Idea. His books could sometimes be the case of talking a subject to death;one might say that he wrote an alcoholic drank, which was compulsively, without any regard tot he consequences. An alcoholics consequences are the stuff of bad soap operas and the diseased thinking real people justify their illiberal behavior with; broken homes, broken promises,lost jobs, lies and more lies about the lies one has already put on the record,  isolation, pitiful and incomprehensible demoralization. Wallace's consequences were far less dramatic and, one says guardedly, less grandiose, but it's the results are  dire all the same, which would be a sheer missing the point of writing at all and treat it as mere process with no real need to regard a reader . Wallace's digressions are legend and his attitude seemed to be that readers cold let him drive this metaphorical vehicle down any and all side streets, blind alleys and dirt roads and be there for the ride while he maintained a monologue of increasing irrelevance, or they  could fuck themselves with their desire to be enthralled and remain at the equally metaphorical bus stop. He was   depressed and stressed, having made it his writer's mission to contain  the multitudes that swarm within him and without him; this was a quixotic task to notice everything about the universe he's chosen to parse, and in turn parse his own thinking about the characters he is giving a close inspection for. His was a virtuosity that couldn't end, as one item led to another item, a distracted description before a circuitous return to the scenario at hand , usually by way of another  round of  qualifications and self-doubt mongering about his chosen occupation of  being a writer , the one who creates a document readers far decades from now will refer to garner something of the verve of the moment in which he lived.We realize , to,that DFW tried to contain these things in  sentences, long sentences, many long, serpentine sentences that stretched , coiled, curled and eventually untied themselves by the time the author had exhausted, or more likely quit ,the tangent he was on. This was his problem in the longer books, the distractions, the digressions, Although I enjoyed large chunks of Infinite Jest ,, there was simply, plainly too much padding between the good parts; there have been especially intelligent discussion in many places of what traditions DFW falls in line with, and that his is a legacy that adds to the sprawling, decenter ed universe Thomas Pynchon has eviscerated   so splendidly. But even Pynchon had some control and was not prone to introduce himself as the self-doubting author attempting to inject a trace of irony with bloated  indecisiveness. Pynchon lectured at times, yes, gave us bounds of information about unexpected things and their history, but he trusted the scenes he created--his ruminations , his research, were the texture and color light in the crowded universes he chose to inspect. DFW , much of the time, was merely chattering all the while in his long novels , Infinite Jest and Broom of the System, and was, as often as not, tone deaf, not unlike one of those extended ,  unaccompanied Keith Jarrett piano impromptus where there is the inevitable and sad drift into artless noodling. DFW often made me think of the guy in back of you at a movie theater who kept talking during the movie; you had to deal with two soundtracks at the same time.
That, of course, might have been what he was attempting, something like a Robert Altman movie where the camera takes it all in and dwells on how inaction resonates among the furniture in is frame and where dialogues ,and city noise overlapped. It might be that Wallace's writing was an attempt to capture his own thought processes in action, as the notions occurred to him, in that proverbial stream of language and instinct where thinking about things are restless and fluid and nearly erotic in their intensity which can never quite be recorded in their abundance. Trying to get that on paper, in between book covers, obsessively , would be doomed to failure, with each book and short story judged by the author as inadequate to the mission. That would depress anyone, some much more severely than others. 

Friday, August 26, 2011

David Foster Wallace

It was only a matter of time, I guess, before a trend emerged  critiquing the  late  David  Foster Wallace's prose style as wanting . Maud Newton takes him apart in a recent New York Times  dis-assembly,  stating that Wallace's  diffuse approach to the paragraph was  "...  mannered and limited in its own way, as manipulative in its recursive self-second-guessing as any more straightforward effort to persuade." Newton goes to lengths to connect Wallace to the decline in properly arranged prose on the internet, quite an accomplishment anyway you look at it.     Matt Kiebus in Death and Taxes comes to DFW's defense with equal force, opining that "Wallace’s slangy style somehow made cluttered passages filled with a rather pedestrian amount of “likes,” “ums,” “sort ofs,” “reallys” and “pretty muches” look beautiful. The sprinkling of such ordinary words by an extraordinary writer was extremely uncommon at the time. His style reflected his personality and humanized a man whose mind didn’t operate on our playing field. Wallace’s colloquialisms made him likeable. His talent made him revered."


Wallace's worst sin as a writer wasn't the slangy quality of his style or even the I-might-be-wrong qualifiers that dot his long paragraphs, but that his sentences lacked emphasis. Where other great writers specializing in long sentences achieve their ends with having a point they are unambiguously headed for, which is to say that they have direction and and drive, Wallace has only spread much of the time. In his shorter efforts, like his non fiction collection "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again", the approach works best ; his thinking and digressions are limited to what is actually in front of him . 


The fact that he cannot   transform something materially objective from his imagination is motivation for him, perhaps, to keep matters moving along. It works as well in his book of short fictions, "Oblivion". where is a bit more off-the-leash in his musing. But overall, you weary of his tone, his ambivalence, his diversions from a subject and realize that reading both his fiction and essays leaves the effect of trying to read a book while the pages are being flipped rapidly. Wallace has the dual characteristics of having a short attention span and being perpetually chatty.  What fans might think to be a masterful unraveling of the invisible links between unrelated subjects I find to be a rudderless drift. 

Saturday, January 15, 2011

This sentence has no period, is therefore timeless

There is  a well argued rationale for the lack of editing in Infinite Jest, that David Foster Wallace was in the tradition of testing the limits of a what a sentence, a paragraph, a page can contain before the onset of the concluding period, the test being that a sentence can drift, digress, take long turns and circuitous routes to the finish a series of ideas,but even digressions have to be pared down to the ones that will have an effect, even a diffuse one that. Wallace really isn't in control of his digressions. Every so-called postmodern writer has to decide , and finally know what effect and point, or drift, they are getting at. 

Even in an style whose hall marks are pastiche, parody and high-minded satire, craft still counts for something, and a sense of the form a book is taking, it's architecture, has to come under control, or else the eventual point of the writing, to study, in an imaginative terrain, some aspects of the human experience, lost entirely. Any working novelist, whether a genre-hack , a royalist, avant-gardes of most any hue, ought to be in control of their materials, where Wallace, with IJ, clearly isn't. 

That control is more instinctual than mechanical, and the ability to know when to stop and allow the fictional incidents resonate in all their overlapping parts. Wallace doesn't trust his instincts, or his readers powers to interpret his material, I guess. There is always one more paragraph, one more digression, one more bit of undigested research for him to add. It's like watching a guy empty his pockets into a plastic tray at an airport metal detector. 

White Noise is written, of course, in a spare and professorial style that some might find maybe too much so. I didn't have that problem, and thought the style perfect for the comedy he wrote. It's a college satire, and was a remarkable choice on his part to convey the distorted elements of the storyline, from the lush descriptions of the sun sets , et al. 

It's a prose style that is brilliant and alive to idea and incident: DeLillo has the rare genius to combine the abstract elements of a philosophical debate with imagery - rich writing that manages several narrative movements at once. His digressions meet and merge with his descriptions, and the result is a true and brooding fiction that aligns the comic with the horrific in a series of novels where the pure chase for meaning within systems of absolute certainty are chipped away at, eroded with many layers of a dead metaphor , slamming up against an unknowable reality that these systems , including literature itself, have claimed entree into. Heady, compulsively readable, vibrantly poetic.Mao ll, Underworld are among the best American novels written in the 20th century. 

Monday, September 15, 2008

David Foster Wallace 2

By Ted Burke


I'm still struggling a bit with what I thought of David Foster Wallace's writing two days after his death, and the truth is that I find him the dual embodiment of the kind of excess that makes me want to toss any and all keyboards I have in my domicile
and the kind of genius I wish I might have been as a writer. It seems appropiate to repost an old essay here I wrote six years ago about the poor man before his best virtues stayed me longer than my misgivings.

________________
David Foster Wallace is an interesting writer who is in dire need of a vicious but fair editor. He notices everything that is odd and potentially wonderful of ponder in his world, but he's able to organize his perceptions; he lacks the ability to discriminate what's actually interesting to a reader from that which is worth only a smirk and a snort for himself.

A Supposedly Fun Thing works, I suppose, because it's nonfiction and the pieces are short, but even here he doesn't take advantage of the compression. He goes rather long too often, and what's is wonderful about his writing and his intelligence is lost. It is really too much work to sift through the giddy semiotics to unearth the verbal gems. Barthes himself had the good sense too be brief in the columns he wrote for the French popular press.

Infinite Jest is perhaps the most exasperating novel I've ever read, along with being the most chronically overrated in contemporary fiction. It may be argued that he novel is about the digressions he favors, and that such digressions place him in line as being the latest "systems novelist", taking up where Gaddis, Pynchon, De Lillo and Barth (John) have led the way, to which I'd say fine, and what of it? The AA and recovery material is potential good fun, and the aspect of powerlessness over a movie ought to be enough for a writer to mold a sure satire, but Wallace seems far to eager to surpass Gravity's Rainbow and The Recognitions in his long, rhythmless sentences. It's been offered that Wallace's particular genius, his contribution to what written language can do, is the extension of the details a sentence can sustain , however long the length required for the feat, and still be grammatically comprehensible.

It's an impressive skill, I suppose, at first or even third reading,but it wearies you, truthfully, it defeats your patience with the author's muse and method as it defeats itself with it's own formless mutations. It may well be that the fault is mine and that I'm either too lazy, impatient or perhaps even too stupid to grasp what Wallace is on to with the infernal linking he does in Infinite Jest, the way every aspect of a addiction and recovery is snaked through quite like the way the tail of Godzilla would drag and smash it's way through the skyscrapers and lesser neighborhoods of Tokyo and Manhattan on the Big Screen. I suspect that I am not so dumb: I've the aforementioned Long Complex novels and I've been able to parse each of their many and subtly placed parts with diligence and patience. Yet Wallace tires me, and gives rise to the need to set the book down, if not toss it in the trash, or use it as weapon, or some other non-literary utility. Pynchon, DeLillo and Gaddis , true their grounding in Modernist narrative ploys (however much each of them warred against a previous generation's concern for a tidier narrative form) supplied you with the sense that they were going somewhere with their parodies of form; there is that element of the shaggy dog story in each of their seminal works, and the comic is recognizably framed; you recognize the effluvia of American culture , and this brings the laugh, and the relief. "Relief" about nails what I find wanting in Wallace's writing; there is none. An editor willing to roll up the sleeves and set to work with an assertive blue pencil would have noted when and where such moments are required, and where they would naturally occur. It would be ironic, in an alternate reality, if the publishers tried to market Infinite Jest to that audience that was put off by the sheer size of the original product with a heavily touted edited special edition. Longer versions of iconic works are published all the time (with rare improvements on the original shorter works); it would make sense that shorter, breezier, sharper version of Infinite Jest would find a market. A big one.The aforementioned editor I proposed would have handed the manuscript back with the observation that this set of multivalent-channeled satires has already been done by the previously mentioned authors whose works are not likely to be matched. Said editor would then advise that over-writing isn't the sure means to break with your influences, but that developing your own style is.

Saturday, September 13, 2008

David Foster Wallace Dead at 46


By Ted Burke

David Foster Wallace wasn't my favorite writer, and I didn't quite "get" the metastatic comedy that was the central work in his short list of books, Infinite Jest, but I did read him often and closely enough in other novels, essays, short stories to see genius, real genius, perhaps the stand alone talent of his generation.He was extremely wordy, prolix was his stock-in-trade, but you kept reading him because he was also brilliantly funny; in this sense Wallace was a true heir of to the late William Gaddis, another genius of long , satirical novels like The Recognitions and JR. Writers like these two are that rare combination of intellectual rigor and approachability; their shared virtuosity was in service to humor, a lessening of the thick clutter that gathers in our waking lives.


At his best, David Foster Wallace is an astute chronicler of the often needless (and fruitless) complications characters create for themselves. In the eight stories that make up his collection Oblivion, he outlineed absurdity, sadness, and sheer comic reality of the outer-edge of consciousness. Fashion magazine editorial boards, consumer research companies, and paranoid office situations are among the areas fictionally explored where human activity fractures into dozens of frantic, nervous tangents. Oblivion is a dizzying, daring set of tales - a riveting virtuoso performance. What was unique about Wallace was that his refusal to be conclusive in his writing, in the sense that a subject ends or a story ends and is finished with when he stops writing. As with a mind that engages life not as framework containing an easily explained and grasped beginning, middle, and end, his prose didn't build to a point to be made, an effect to be had, nor did it perform the artificial dialectic of having it's dualisms come into conflict and produce some unexpected new thing.

Wallace's virtuosity and brilliance at undermining a reader's expectations didn't always justify the lengths he went to in order to set up scenes and digressions.
Much of what could have been knock out prose simply goes limp at length. There's a numbing lack of emphasis in Infinite Jest and The Broom of the System that reveals what one would call undigested research. The encyclopedism is a habit he gained from Pynchon and DeLillo, I think, but both those writers have a since of scale, and a style that reins in the excess: their sense what makes an antic sprawl is better served by their respective senses of proportion, developed, I think, under the the tutelage and blue pencil of editors who were not afraid to hack away what does not work and instruct in the mending of what does.

Wallace has no such sense of scale, and remains a promising talent; he was less a wunderkind than bright chatterbox who, not finding the right words for an idea, uses all of them. This seems to be the case when first experiencing his prose, and one does discern a method, a purpose and a heart that goes with his profusion --he as much as any writer tested the limits to which writing could embrace it's contradictions and ambivalence as the a counter thesis was instantly presented any discriptive/perscriptive remarks he might offer. He was a "systems novelist" like Pynchon, DeLillo and the late William Gaddis, but Wallace's system who nooks and crevices he inspected, invaded and described in mesmerizingly, excrutiating detail was language itself. His prose seemed the equivilent of actual speech, full of stutters, doubling back, purposeful self-contradiction. Indeed, prose and the sentences that mark length was an extension of a mind that will not settled in place; his point was the refusal to have a point. Life was too important to have a meaning behind it all; that, he thought, would be conclusive and spoil all the joy and strange tastes of sadness that come our way between dawn and dusk.




The fiction didn't have a pretense of fulfilling a grand narrative; rather, these were mini narratives we traveled through, formations of the society and the habits of its characters revealed who are at once loosely connected with everything else in the area and yet so close in proximity. His writing was a record of continual process, full of unveilings, small voiced declarations, competing manifestos of how to change the way things are. Whatever DFW comes to be called years from now, he was a perhaps the first post modernist writer to understand irony as it's lived, not applied as a card trick. He was a master, and he will be missed.

Ironic, yes, that Wallace's exhausting "maximalist" style, which seems dedicated to fitting everything in sight into a sentence that contains everything else, works best in his shorter pieces: the humor hits harder, the stretches of associations don't have time to die on the vine.
Wallace could make sentences seem like it were a sentient being with lives and curiosities of their own, touching everything their looping syntax and serpentine rhythms could circle their clauses around, and rarely loose the central premise that commenced the writing to begin with; his writing was something akin to a Keith Jarrett piano improvisation where theme and variation became such fully and forcefully units of energy and execution that they soon became full developed bits of art on their own, with their own terms.

American writing has lost a champion.