It was with some trepidation that I rented the movie last Friday. It was about writer David Foster Wallace (titled "The End of the Tour"), whose name was easy to remember, as my best friend from high school had the first two names, and another friend the last. Otherwise, as with most names, the author would have been forgotten by me, for who really has read David Foster Wallace?
I know who. He is considered the "writer's writer," someone who lived in such rarefied air that only the glitter-otty could appreciate him - and appreciate him they did (and still do). But I am not of their numbers, not by a long shot. I don't like most modern art (which started in the 1890's - and it still hasn't caught on with the public) or performance theater or other such moddish things - although I did get caught up in the rage of post-structuralism in grad school, but I was then younger and more foolish. No, most of this stuff is, to me, worthless; mere attempts to push into pointless new territory that has nothing to do with me and, as far as I can see, reflects only pure ego.
But that is not why I feared the Wallace movie. I had heard of him while driving to the lumber store to buy pressure-treated wood to build a wagon to haul manure and wood, when I clicked on NPR. They were having a post-mortum celebration of Wallace on the anniversary of his suicide at the age of 46. The praises! One of the greatest of the last one hundred years in English literature! Unique, wonderful, eye-popping: the praise was unending. Of course I had to get his book.
The local public library had to get it through library loan, so I waited for a week for his opus, Infinite Jest. Its one thousand pages did not daunt me - I had, after all, read War and Peace and actually had liked it. And the first 40 or so pages had me interested. There was not a dull moment, and I could see why writers loved him. Like Hemingway's work for more recent times, there was nothing lost in his verbiage, nothing extraneous to take away the impact of the emotions he was portraying. He was, indeed, a master of his craft. But I couldn't make it past the first one hundred pages exactly because of the immediacy of the emotions, because the emotions were so absolutely repulsive. I will not even try to describe how that was, but the world he painted was so alien, so terrifying in its ordinariness, so foul that I could not make myself live in it for another 100 pages, let alone another 900. But the book had made a big impact, and I understood how a writer who was feted as one of the world's greatest would kill himself at the height of his fame. I, too, could not live with a mind like that.
The movie, however, portrayed a more human Wallace, one who was flush with complexes but very likable in his oddness. I would recommend it to anyone interested in authors. It is told through an interviewer from Rolling Stone who, bravely I think, allowed himself to be portrayed as an asshole so that we might sympathize with his subject, and at that the movie succeeded brilliantly. We learn more about fame, jealousy, and what makes, in retrospect, for a good life. It does not bring us close to the edge, but to the normal contemplation of ego vs The Meaning of Life, that Big Picture that is as true as it is trite, and never exhausted. But it left out, I believe, the real Wallace, who only near the end tells of his stay in the asylum, of the horror of coming to the end of meaning and finding nothing.
Someone like me screams out, "But David - this was your chance! You were on the edge of True Consciousness! Do not kill yourself!," but that is easy to say when one is not suffering from deep depression and madness. Fame means nothing in such a condition,as we learn from the last scenes of the movie. Here, the interviewer exposes his jealousy for Wallace's genius, and Wallace replies, "You don't want to be me." Read his greatest book and I think most would agree.
But thoughts of Wallace and the literary elite brought up my old friend with the odd name, Fritsjoff Schuan. A Swiss scholar of religion, and a devout practitioner of mystical Islam, he despised modernity, claiming that art took its first direction downward during the Renaissance. This is exactly when most of us think that art got good, but he explains that, before that, art was done for its meaning. Most painters upheld traditions, such as iconography, that were formulated over the centuries to convey the being of God, and humans within it. They were most often anonymous, and that was the way it should have been. The art was not to show off the genius of the artist, but the wonder of the world. It was comparatively crude, but spiritually compelling.
Art since the Renaissance, on the other hand, increasingly looked to glorify the skill of the artist. With time, it culminated in "modern" art, which has bored or sent into giggles the average viewer for over a century. In writing, it went from often anonymous works, like The Cloud of Being, to the 19th century adventure pieces, to the increasingly dark, psychologically focused novels of the 20th. By the late 20th, the "good" books had largely fallen in to the philosophy that life is insanely erratic, meaningless in a weird, coincidental way, as if there could possibly be a God, but only God as Jester. In this world, things are eerily magical, but nothing makes sense; it is a world of hapless madness. The style with these books has got to be breathless, to show-off great linguistic mastery.
And thus, at its peak, we find David Foster Wallace, although no one could say that his art was contrived. On the contrary, his madness fit the template of the modern novel, and he, by that same magical coincidence of the modern novel, became its crowned prince. But because it was genuine, Wallace had to live with the real-life consequences of his vision, and he found that he could not. I don't blame him. But I do wonder at the cutting edge of our cultural elite, at their embrace of a philosophy that goes no where beyond the ego or beyond the complex twisting of the our constantly changing social system - and indeed, feeds into a downward spiral that could not end well. Maybe for a few, who are proclaimed geniuses by their peers, but not for society at large.
This is why Schuan, the curmudgeon, despised the notion of evolution - not for its biological workings, but for the concept it brought to society that we are always getting better, always progressing. A look at Wallace and our cultural avatars, those whose elitist ideas we are supposed to follow, gives reason to Schuan's anti-modernist views. Considering Wallace and many of our guiding lights of art and culture, it is hard to argue against him. FK
I know who. He is considered the "writer's writer," someone who lived in such rarefied air that only the glitter-otty could appreciate him - and appreciate him they did (and still do). But I am not of their numbers, not by a long shot. I don't like most modern art (which started in the 1890's - and it still hasn't caught on with the public) or performance theater or other such moddish things - although I did get caught up in the rage of post-structuralism in grad school, but I was then younger and more foolish. No, most of this stuff is, to me, worthless; mere attempts to push into pointless new territory that has nothing to do with me and, as far as I can see, reflects only pure ego.
But that is not why I feared the Wallace movie. I had heard of him while driving to the lumber store to buy pressure-treated wood to build a wagon to haul manure and wood, when I clicked on NPR. They were having a post-mortum celebration of Wallace on the anniversary of his suicide at the age of 46. The praises! One of the greatest of the last one hundred years in English literature! Unique, wonderful, eye-popping: the praise was unending. Of course I had to get his book.
The local public library had to get it through library loan, so I waited for a week for his opus, Infinite Jest. Its one thousand pages did not daunt me - I had, after all, read War and Peace and actually had liked it. And the first 40 or so pages had me interested. There was not a dull moment, and I could see why writers loved him. Like Hemingway's work for more recent times, there was nothing lost in his verbiage, nothing extraneous to take away the impact of the emotions he was portraying. He was, indeed, a master of his craft. But I couldn't make it past the first one hundred pages exactly because of the immediacy of the emotions, because the emotions were so absolutely repulsive. I will not even try to describe how that was, but the world he painted was so alien, so terrifying in its ordinariness, so foul that I could not make myself live in it for another 100 pages, let alone another 900. But the book had made a big impact, and I understood how a writer who was feted as one of the world's greatest would kill himself at the height of his fame. I, too, could not live with a mind like that.
The movie, however, portrayed a more human Wallace, one who was flush with complexes but very likable in his oddness. I would recommend it to anyone interested in authors. It is told through an interviewer from Rolling Stone who, bravely I think, allowed himself to be portrayed as an asshole so that we might sympathize with his subject, and at that the movie succeeded brilliantly. We learn more about fame, jealousy, and what makes, in retrospect, for a good life. It does not bring us close to the edge, but to the normal contemplation of ego vs The Meaning of Life, that Big Picture that is as true as it is trite, and never exhausted. But it left out, I believe, the real Wallace, who only near the end tells of his stay in the asylum, of the horror of coming to the end of meaning and finding nothing.
Someone like me screams out, "But David - this was your chance! You were on the edge of True Consciousness! Do not kill yourself!," but that is easy to say when one is not suffering from deep depression and madness. Fame means nothing in such a condition,as we learn from the last scenes of the movie. Here, the interviewer exposes his jealousy for Wallace's genius, and Wallace replies, "You don't want to be me." Read his greatest book and I think most would agree.
But thoughts of Wallace and the literary elite brought up my old friend with the odd name, Fritsjoff Schuan. A Swiss scholar of religion, and a devout practitioner of mystical Islam, he despised modernity, claiming that art took its first direction downward during the Renaissance. This is exactly when most of us think that art got good, but he explains that, before that, art was done for its meaning. Most painters upheld traditions, such as iconography, that were formulated over the centuries to convey the being of God, and humans within it. They were most often anonymous, and that was the way it should have been. The art was not to show off the genius of the artist, but the wonder of the world. It was comparatively crude, but spiritually compelling.
Art since the Renaissance, on the other hand, increasingly looked to glorify the skill of the artist. With time, it culminated in "modern" art, which has bored or sent into giggles the average viewer for over a century. In writing, it went from often anonymous works, like The Cloud of Being, to the 19th century adventure pieces, to the increasingly dark, psychologically focused novels of the 20th. By the late 20th, the "good" books had largely fallen in to the philosophy that life is insanely erratic, meaningless in a weird, coincidental way, as if there could possibly be a God, but only God as Jester. In this world, things are eerily magical, but nothing makes sense; it is a world of hapless madness. The style with these books has got to be breathless, to show-off great linguistic mastery.
And thus, at its peak, we find David Foster Wallace, although no one could say that his art was contrived. On the contrary, his madness fit the template of the modern novel, and he, by that same magical coincidence of the modern novel, became its crowned prince. But because it was genuine, Wallace had to live with the real-life consequences of his vision, and he found that he could not. I don't blame him. But I do wonder at the cutting edge of our cultural elite, at their embrace of a philosophy that goes no where beyond the ego or beyond the complex twisting of the our constantly changing social system - and indeed, feeds into a downward spiral that could not end well. Maybe for a few, who are proclaimed geniuses by their peers, but not for society at large.
This is why Schuan, the curmudgeon, despised the notion of evolution - not for its biological workings, but for the concept it brought to society that we are always getting better, always progressing. A look at Wallace and our cultural avatars, those whose elitist ideas we are supposed to follow, gives reason to Schuan's anti-modernist views. Considering Wallace and many of our guiding lights of art and culture, it is hard to argue against him. FK
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