David Foster Wallace
BRIEF INTERVIEWS WITH HIDEOUS MEN.
271pp. Abacus. Paperback. £9.99.
0 349 11271 1.
The radical problem besetting contemporary American fiction at present is that
the United States corresponds almost exactly with its image in popular
culture, but not quite. Scrappy fragments of the real United States may fly
about the crisp outlines of its televisual simulacrum but, within the
mediated frame of our United Kingdom-based perception, such discrepancies
are minor disruptions. It is easier to edit them out than act on the
suspicions they arouse. The image sharpens and becomes more convincing and,
in consequence, the mediated US grows familiar and conventional, more
realistic than the Real, its lurid and alluring affects more compelling.
We are, accordingly, compelled, and doubly so because the same perceptual
confusion obtains within the United States. Those art-forms (among which I
include literary fiction) on which we, at our transatlantic remove, rely for
a critical view of the discrepancy between the real and mediated "Americas"
are succumbing to the same collapse in distinctions and becoming caught up
in the same whirl of ontological buck-passing. We look to American
writers for the real America, or at least for a critique of the fake. What if
they are not looking at each other? If contemporary American fiction is
about itself - if there is no "out there" there - then where is the real US?
Where did it go? How do we recognize it? How do we get it back? These
questions press on both the readers and writers of contemporary American
fiction, most of whom at present seem unaware or powerless in face of their
existence. David Foster Wallace is pre-eminent among a small group of
writers, almost unknown on this side of the Atlantic, whose work recognizes
and attempts to address them.
The terms of his attempt were set out in an essay he wrote in 1993 for an
issue of the Review of Contemporary Fiction devoted to his work. Entitled "E
Unibus Pluram: Television and US fiction", it took the statistic that United
States citizens watch an average of six hours of television a day, and asked
why, and to what effect? The elaborate answer involved Wallace in a survey
of postmodern fiction's habitual idioms and the consequences of this, a
comprehensive trashing of one of his peers (Mark Leyner), and a tentative
prescription for future action. A summary of the essay might read:
Television's placid support for the domestic status quo in the 1960s and 70s
(images of happy nuclear families against a reality which included Vietnam
and Watergate) was exposed by "cool" ironic commentaries in postmodern
novels by Thomas Pynchon, Joseph McElroy, Don DeLillo, William Gaddis and
others. Television appropriated and institutionalized that ironic idiom, and
thereby found the perfect means to suppress the various contradictions in
its appeal to the viewer (briefly, television's propensity to mock, subvert
and refer to itself being presented as an in-joke for the "sophisticated"
individual viewer, who can then pretend he is not one of the herd). From
being critical and transformative, postmodern irony became oppressive.
Contemporary American fiction writers, having inherited their defining
(transgressive) idiom from the preceding generation, now find themselves
locked in it, unable to erase the possibility that whatever they may write,
they might actually be meaning its opposite. Now, to be "cool" and ironic is
to play the game; writers should be rewriting the rules, if not blowing up
the stadium.
Wallace's essay is collected in A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again
(1998), and it is the most trenchant short account available of what
television does to its consumers and
cultural rivals, and how it does it. The debate aroused in the United States
this year by
Jedediah Purdy's For Common Things, a gauche but heartfelt book about irony's
(destructive) effects on civic responsibility which drags a broader brush
over the same area of concern, testifies to Wallace's prescience, but the
essay's salient feature is perhaps the level of its author's anxiety.
In Wallace's analysis, however quickly American fiction writers reach for the
real, their hands grasp imagery first. Television imagery, which is to say
ironized imagery, and the habit of ironic mockery it both instils and needs.
For Wallace's generation, who grew up reading the writing on the wall in
Pynchon, Barth, Coover and (above all) DeLillo, institutionalized irony is
now the air the writer breathes. There is no choice, short of holding one's
breath. Wallace's anxiety is a displaced reaction to his own cultural
environment. He knows he is breathing poison.
I think that readers (and writers) in the United Kingdom misread a certain
kind of
ironic-cool voice and certain kinds of formal experimentation in American
fiction as a style, in the way that Tom Wolfe's work evinces a style, and
John Updike's work a different style, and so on. But this is wrong. The
voice and the kinds of experimentation in the work of, say, Jonathan
Franzen, A. M. Home, Ken Kalfus, Mark Leyner, Wallace himself, and all the
other grandchildren of the DeLillo of White Noise, do not comprise a style
but an awareness of and a response to the condition out of which fiction is
produced. The ironic voice signals that an institutionalized pop culture is
not only the object of literature's inquiry, but the hopelessly compromised
means of that inquiry too. How to break out of this self-defeating
hermeneutic circle?
In his 1993 essay, having concluded that the ironic sneer of American
television culture could not be out-cooled and that its reflexive backflips
would always out-flex those of fiction, however experimental, Wallace ended
his piece on a tentative note:
The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the
cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the "Oh how
banal."
The essay is important, because Wallace, after more than 27,000 words of dense
argument and detailed example, clears enough space to make this honest
unironical statement honestly and unironically. For a couple of wobbly
paragraphs, he is outside the ironic aura, even though, when the quotation
above was written, it was presumably the only possible example of the
literature it invoked. Wallace's anxiety and his perpetual sense of physical
discomfort (which runs throughout his work) both grow out of a heightened
understanding of the ubiquitous ironizing aura in which contemporary
American fiction (his own included) finds itself unable to mean what it
says, however earnestly it tries to say it, because earnestness now just
sounds wrong. America's acoustics have changed. To put it another way, hip
postmodern irony gets under Wallace's skin. And because Wallace thinks with
his skin, this awareness is omnipresent in his work. Almost alone among
those writers with something worth saying and the skill to say it, Wallace
appears able to exist in ironically rendered America and write
without resorting to its terms.
His fiction includes: The Broom of the System (a novel, 1987), Girl with
Curious Hair (1989 -short stories, the last of which, "Westward the Course
of Empire Takes its Way", a novel-length act of patricide on the novelist
John Barth, has been forcefully disowned by Wallace), Infinite Jest (a very
long novel, with footnotes, 1996), and now Brief Interviews With Hideous
Men. He has also produced a lot of journalism, mostly reportage with a
strong analytical bent covering such diverse subjects as the Luxury Cruise
phenomenon, tennis, The Illinois State Fair, and the sociology of a David
Lynch film set. A report entitled "Neither Adult Nor Entertainment", on the
Adult Video Awards ceremony in Las Vegas in January 1998, which appeared
under the byline of
"Willem R. DeGroot and Matt Rundlet" in the September 1998 issue of Premiere
magazine, may plausibly also be attributed to Wallace. The presence of
numerous lengthy footnotes, the authors' (author's?) habit of cataloguing,
enumerating and analysing everything in sight, and insistence on fully
disclosing the exact (flawed) terms of their (his?) remit, urge an
identification with the Wallace of his more conventional journalism. That
piece compares the "the whole sardonic postmodern deal" of the Oscars
ceremony with its porn industry equivalent, to the detriment of both, noting
that "the whole mainstream celebrity culture is rushing to cash in. The
whole thing seems to suck."
If "Neither Adult Nor Entertainment" is not by Wallace, then it cannot have
informed "Adult World, Parts I and II", in Brief Interviews, which is about
"a young couple experiencing sexual difficulties" according to the blurb.
The husband is a secret porn-user, compulsive masturbator and currency
dealer. His wife worries about their sex life, consults a former boyfriend,
and discovers her husband's secret. In Part II, written as a schema for the
continuation Wallace saw no point in writing, she exchanges her "Dildo"
(furtively purchased to practise her oral sex technique) for several dildos
(brazenly purchased to masturbate with, and "now not captlzd", Wallace
notes). The couple think about having children.
The skimpy narrative exists primarily to register movements in the subtext
which moves teasingly beneath it, just as pornographic language does beneath
conventional language. The prose enacts this explicitly, flashing a glimpse
of the "spanked pink" of the husband's "thingie", for instance, in the
"spanked pinks and slapped reds" of emergency vehicle lights reflecting off
a wet freeway later in the story. The care with which Wallace renders the
surface of Part I becomes a sort of poignant joke, given its subsequent
casual trashing for the exigencies of Part II, where the pornography's bones
are laid bare.
"Adult World" makes some brutal trades between the integrity of its rhetorical
position and any pretension to aesthetic pleasure. It is difficult for
fiction to be this honest about its own procedures, and a lot of this
difficulty gets passed straight to the reader. One of the more conventional
stories in the collection is called "The Depressed Person". It won an O.
Henry award. A depressed woman calls the members of what she calls her
"Support System" to talk about her problems, hating herself for doing so but
unable to stop as she makes ever more exorbitant claims on their (and our)
attention, time and sympathy. The lower she sinks, the more irritating she
becomes (the story is exclusively from her point of view), but the more
deserving of the very help she so irritatingly demands also, and so on, via
her own pitiless self-analyses, into the depths of self-loathing . . . .
A possible reading is supplied by the opening sentence of "Pop Quiz 9" from
the story-series "Octet": it begins, "You are, unfortunately, a fiction
writer." "Octet" is, if not the maddest, certainly the most maddening of the
stories here, presenting itself as an abortive attempt to present
intractably convoluted moral problems in terms of a parlour game. The last
(numbered 9, actually the fifth of a projected but never-completed eight)
spins itself into reflexive knots via text and footnotes, but then somehow
keeps spinning and spinning around, as if some impossibly gifted Houdini of
narrative had been misinformed: the trick was not to break free but actually
to get progressively more tied up. I have no idea how many readers will
follow Wallace as he confesses his successive misgivings about this project
in ever more abstruse footnotes, but, just at the point of the story's disappearance over the last horizon of readerly patience and its own
long-overdue collapse, a signal thought strikes. Wallace means it. These are
not ironic reflexive gestures meant to distance the writer from the imminent
implosion of his own artefact. They are Wallace's own, sincere misgivings.
In the light of this, much of the collection's strangeness becomes meaningful.
Its "out there" forms and weird choices of subject are eccentric only if the
centre is defined by precisely the hip, flip postmodern irony whose shadow
Wallace is sneaking out from under. If he means it, then the collection's
title story, a discontinuous series of interviews from which the female
interviewer's questions have been erased, turns from being a juvenile
exercise in epater les bourgeois into a series of psychological traps.
Certainly, these men are hideous. But they are funny too, now and again. One
can sympathize with them, just about. And then it dawns on you (as it did not
on any of the American reviewers of this book) that almost all of them are,
one way or another, rapists. Now keep laughing.
The perverse choices Wallace makes are disturbing and serious. He treats
subject matter normally considered unfit for fiction. There is very little
parody in the book and what there is would look broad even in a pantomime.
"Tri-Stan I Sold Sissee Nar to Ecko" is a reimagining of the Tristan and
Isolde and Echo and Narcissus legends set in a futurized "medieval"
California. The bardic narrator ("Ovid the Obtuse") laments, "Alas, we no
longer get to say 'alas' with a straight face, but 'alas' used, according to
legend, to be what you said in great stoic sorrow over tragedies
ineluctable. 'Hic barbarus ego sum, quia non intellegor ulli'."
A piece of doggerel included in "Westward the Course of Empire . . ." ten
years ago asked for whom the fun-house was fun? The answer is, "Everyone!",
until that is, it isn't. Escaping it is to leave behind not only the ironic
funsters but also their ironic idea of fun. That is, the idea of fun
culturally dominant at the moment, which is the moment upon which Wallace
calls time in this collection. As a result these stories are not easy to
read. Several fail. The best is "Church Not Made With Hands", which presents
a series of verbal tableaux concerning the loss of a child, the recession of
perspective and quality of light in the paintings of Vermeer, and the
sadnesses consequent upon both.
Wallace argues mutedly that they are the same at root.
That story could not have been written in the fun-house, because a sad story
must, finally, be sincere, and because the fun-house's cipher of sincerity,
sadness and all that makes one sad is "Outside". The piece of doggerel
quoted above went on to ask for whom was the fun-house a house? Not for
Wallace's characters or their
stories which are written out in the "out there", in the real United States.
They are consequently, according to our current idea of fun, rough, awkward
and difficult. The most urgent justifications for their thorniness are, for
the moment, North American preoccupations. The annulling and pervasive habit
of unthinking irony Wallace diagnoses in contemporary popular culture and
seeks to correct by example does not (yet) bite so hard in Britain. This
does not make the stories any easier. Yet if one accepts that the proper
remit of contemporary American fiction is to deal with America as it is, and
the habits of mind which make it so, then
Wallace - not Jay McInerney, nor Bret Easton Ellis, inter alia - is the most
significant writer of his generation.
David Foster Wallace's magnum opus remains Infinite Jest, which is a book
about how one's exterior environment (or world) persuades one's interior
environment (or self) that the latter cannot live without the former:
addiction, in the broadest possible sense. It was serious and unironic as
only a novel of 981 pages of densely inventive prose and ninety-six pages of
minutely printed notes can be. The stories in Brief Interviews with Hideous
Men can be read as long-range forays launched from that project. They
operate at the limit of the range of the short story and under self-imposed
conditions of the utmost stringency. The unmediated terrain they seek is
very distant from US fiction's current habitual haunts: some of these
stories never find it and others never make it back. Those that do bring
news of a rare and real America.
