is this lovely little piece by Maud Newton for the Times magazine, “Another Thing to Sort of Pin on David Foster Wallace.” What’s that, you ask? Crappy Internet writing.
Enjoy, and tell us how you think we fare (and Maud, too).
21 August 2011 by jqmarks
is this lovely little piece by Maud Newton for the Times magazine, “Another Thing to Sort of Pin on David Foster Wallace.” What’s that, you ask? Crappy Internet writing.
Enjoy, and tell us how you think we fare (and Maud, too).
I was going to say ouch, but after sleeping on it, I don’t know. I think this is why I love Derrida.
His being this fictional character, this placeholder. This two word invocation signifying nothing. You most often get summonings of Derrida like this — Newton summons him twice, here — in that genre of reflection on how the writer has grown up, usually British. When I was a young impressionable fool, the Derridas of the world, you understand, took me. (It’s not un-analogous to the communist-turned-conservative story.) But I have grown out of all that. For, see, I was “forced to confront serious ethical and practical questions” — Brown v Board of Ed, Roe v Wade — “that managed not to be resolved by the insights of Derrida.” Having been freed from the Derridas’ dreamy distraction-inducing paws, I am awake now: I know what really matters.
You, too, must grow up if you want me not to like you, but take you seriously.
I believe Newton’s actually, at least, read Derrida. But I just can’t get it. What, I want to ask her, in person, in Derrida makes you think that he’s doing anything, ever, but confronting serious ethical and practical questions? (Why’s the only image we have of confrontation of going nose to nose? Of X v. Y?) It’s not his questions themselves, because almost all of the man’s questions are literally lifted from the Greeks and Jews (and you, now serious, stand hard on your jewgreek foundation). It must be how he asks them, then. He loops about in figure eights, that’s true; though — and I want to say, I don’t know why people ignore this, but I think I do — he regularly intersperses into this looping-about statements that are directer than directness itself. Contrast, make you hear. Plus, and I think this is probably a crime, too, he tends when he’s on to really enjoy himself. To almost sometimes seem to be privileging his own enjoyment of whatever he’s doing over the given stated task at hand. Which, motherfucker, that is the the height of juvenile. The indulgent French dick. Charlatan, sophist. This man who hides himself behind veils in writing to the detriment of his readers’ enlightenment having been around forever, promise. Trickster, thief, bad example. Misguider. Empty promiser. It can go on.
“[...] that managed not to be resolved by the insights of Derrida.” I was under the impression that that was the triumph.
Anyway, at what point did we agree, together, that it’s resolution we want?
Newton is pretty right about this: generations repeat their predecessors, while at the same time fancying itself beset by a unique set of problems. (They’re not totally wrong: they are new, but because you can’t step in the same river twice — the shoes they’ve filled are theirs now — not because the questions aren’t almost literal reproductions of previous generations’ problems.)
I’m for seriousness, urgency, too, count me in. But whence, again, the insistence that seriousness is mutually exclusive with playing around? Have you read someone who manages, tone-wise, to be serious and not at the same time, not alternately, but at the same time? Isn’t there little seriouser?
And how come genuine arguments can only ever follow straight lines? Anyway, the linking of Derrida with DFW is weird. DFW believes a hell of a lot of more in people than Derrida does.
But, so, if we’re talking about DFW — which, I’m not sure Newton is; I think she’s more making him into a synecdoche of the time/place she shares with him; or, a representative of her former, shed, disavowed self — we might ask it more like this: why does fake-sounding language necessarily mean fake/bad feelings? Why does language at war with itself mean fake arguments? Why equate weakness with fakeness, worthlessness? Why do you hate the veneer?
I can’t help feel, even after sitting at this kitchen table staring at the cat outside staring at the tree questioning my loyalties, like Newton is too willfully missing something. It’s not so much the irony — not the necessity and joy of saying what you’re trying to say by not saying it (i.e. not saying it directly, which for most people seems to immediately signify that nothing has been said). It’s more that speaking is not easy. Speaking is really not easy, and this difficulty is, I think, something particular to our generation, having something to do with what Zadie Smith refers to our generational self-consciousness. (Are we, you and me, jq, part of DFW’s generation?) That plain direct question — how to speak?, which is close close cousins with, Where to start?, as well as: How to avoid speaking? — is how you might more interestingly link DFW and Derrida.
But if we’re talking about DFW, it’s got a different Americanner hue: I’ve always gotten the feeling that he was trying, when he does what Newton describes him doing, and qualifies like mad, that he was trying to write himself out of a perfectly fit-to-size hole. Like, if he is couching arguments in apology (and, yes, fiction has arguments to make), then that couching’s secondary to the fact that what he’s doing in these moments of recursive self-second-guessing is reproducing the ruling language of the world smugly encasing him. Why? Imitating 20th/21st century American dialects is a party trick, but like most party tricks — essentially, Newton’s right, performed to win over others — it’s more, too. Done with all your body and soul (as DFW does it), it’s a way of freeing you, who are also a 20th/21st century American, from what happens to also be your main daily language for living in. The realest language you have, in other words, is an annoying one. (Geoff Dyer, whose brief reflection on DFW is lovelier than Newton’s, gets the graveness of this annoyingness.) DFW’s very practical self-assigned task is to abuse the shit out of that language — mainly, by pleonasm and repetition, I’d argue — in order to make himself a little room to breathe. And then start from there.
I don’t know if he’s making it for us.
The frequent moments when he fails — often, as in the line from the porn essay Newton quotes — tell me nothing so much as: It’s hard, what he’s trying to do. But then, sometimes, in fact oftener than he annoys me, DFW’s agrammatical contortions are beautiful. Surprising and poetry. Where’s that in this article?
Anyway, if you’re a beginner sociologist (which is better, I think, than being an advanced one), you might call DFW’s self-assigned task something like making the familiar strange. If you also like Martin Heidegger, you might drop that and call it making the normal ecstatic, i.e., showing it to be so.
I have a few more questions, thoughts, then I’ll quit.
- What makes it not annoying when Joyce does it? “Lily, the caretaker’s daughter, was literally run off her feet.” Not precisely so. But that’s how you talk. So what is it? Is it Joyce’s economy? (But, if you look, he does it far less sparingly than might first register.) Is it his restraint — that the fake generational (i.e. transient, un-literary) agrammatical voice appears artfully, at moments, embedded in a master writer’s voice? That he keeps himself from being totally consumed by the voices he’s channeling? What Joyce are we talking about anymore? Why do we notice less when Joyce does it? (I bet you could find a Newton writing something like this about Joyce, then.)
- I know what Newton’s talking about. But I think she’s misidentifying the problem. I think Dyer (linked above) is more onto it: catching, highly infectious. Something about DFW’s tone — and it’s worth mulling more on how this something is, I think — is nastily inviting of imitation. For starters, I’ll venture that this has something to do with the fact that the tone itself is indeed in a sense irreducibly imitative. Fire begetting fire type of thing. I’m not sure. I’m surer that the infectiousness of DFW’s way of writing — not the characteristics of the way itself — is what Newton means to be calling out. Bad imitations (no matter of what, or who) are always crappy. But a lot of really great writing, I think, is marked by the fact that it’s imitated itself into some place of its own, elsewhere. Manned itself into ape. On the tragic side, part of what makes DFW hurt, and in a way not necessarily worth it, is that he really seems bent on not letting you forget how to the core derivative he is.
- I know what Newton/AO are talking about. But refusing to take sides — to, in an instant, make a decision — and aiming to have your cake and eat it, too — this is different from hinting that aporias are where life lives.
- I want to believe that Newton’s intention is to free writers like her from the semi-unconscious conviction that the only way to be honest is to write like DFW. If you tweak her tone a bit — her conclusion, as it sits, annoys me — you could take her to be implying this at the end, and she’d be right. It’s not the only way. I myself very desperately over here need to believe that, too, btw, if you haven’t noticed. (Do you?) I think another thing that she almost identifies, but doesn’t quite, is that the self-second-guessing favored by a writer like DFW has less to do with a dishonesty or a wish to be liked — to seem honest, full well conscious of the irony (this is an irony) that trying will precisely preclude that purpose — than it does with a fear of being heard; which is related to hating the words that come out of your mouth. Stains, stains, each one. Sometimes it’s like he wants to be heard — can’t help but be heard — but not read.
- Dyer’s superficial observation is a good one: “He’s one of those writers who won’t let the reader get a word in edgeways.” Thing is, there are silent pauses studding DFW that do just that. A question is whether we could have these stilled time-outs without all of the white noisy stuff engulfing them. As Derrida probably wouldn’t say: try.