![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.nybooks.com\/media\/img\/illustrations\/wallace_davi_foste_no-20000210039R.2_png_300x379_q85.png\" "\\"David")
\u201cYou do not have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body.\u201d<\/p>\n\u201cYou do not have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u2013C.S. Lewis<\/p>\n
To be an artist is to be constantly dissatisfied. Many acclaimed artists have said this, and though not acclaimed, I identify. I have habit of sitting on projects for too long, afraid to let go until they\u2019re absolutely perfect, a habit that usually doesn\u2019t lead to perfection but preciousness, an inability to let go.<\/p>\n
In an attempt to be more at ease with doing as Faulkner commanded and \u201ckill my darlings,\u201d I\u2019m doing a similar thing when I read, looking out for the precious progeny of the author.<\/p>\n
David Foster Wallace, whose many detractors feel he should have killed a few hundred more darlings in his loose, baggy fiction, speaks to this double vision in his 1988 essay \u201cFictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young,\u201d collected for the first time in his posthumous book of essays Both Flesh and Not<\/em>.<\/p>\n Wallace writes, \u201cToday\u2019s journeyman fiction writer finds himself both a lover of serious narrative and an ineluctably conditioned part of a pop-dominated culture in which the social stock of his own entertainment is falling. What we are inside of\u2014what comprises<\/em> us\u2014is killing what we love.\u201d<\/p>\n I don\u2019t recommend reading Wallace when trying to work on being a more merciless killer-of-your-darlings because he is not interested in economy. He\u2019s not worried about a reader being turned-off by his rapacious erudition; he\u2019s interested in making himself as clear as possible\u2014that\u2019s what\u2019s up with the footnotes, he admitted in an infamously awkward interview with Charlie Rose.<\/p>\n I\u2019ve started to change my tune, or at least not worry so much, because, as Wallace\u2019s essay argues, what we should be worrying about is that our stylistic choices are being informed by what sells, by what is \u201cwatchable.\u201d<\/p>\n Then, and even more so now, audiences expect to be entertained. Neil Postman, whose seminal book Amusing Ourselves to Death<\/em> was published three years before Wallace\u2019s essay, describes entertainment as one of the sacred rights afforded Americans.<\/p>\n And if being entertained is a right, then books, film, and music that do not deliver the goods clearly and directly will be seen, ultimately, as not just a waste of time but as offensive. After all, as Dr. King once said, \u201cA right delayed is a right denied.\u201d<\/p>\n Like Postman, Wallace sees this situation in a quasi-moral and ethical light. He argues that popular entertainment is affecting \u201cthe existential predicaments\u201d of audiences because \u201cwe are strongly encouraged to identify with characters for whom death is not a significant creative possibility\u2026we lose any sense of eschatology, thus of teleology, and live in a moment that is, paradoxically, both emptied of intrinsic meaning or end and quite literally eternal<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n Wallace\u2019s dropping of the \u201ce-word\u201d (eschatology) raises the stakes of the conversation to a mystical level that many of his contemporaries (Mark Leyner, Jonathan Franzen, and Richard Powers, to name a few) wouldn\u2019t\/won\u2019t go. We are finite beings, and Wallace contends:<\/p>\n The danger is that, as entertainment\u2019s denials of the truth get even more effective and pervasive and seductive, we will eventually forget what they\u2019re denials <\/em>of. This is scary. Because it seems transparent to me that, if we forget how to die, we\u2019re going to forget how to live.<\/em><\/p>\n Wallace might come off as a little too hard on television here\u2014I mean, he\u2019s asking a lot of it. But consider that what began as a way of transmitting visual information across long distances, quickly became the <\/em>source of entertainment and information in the home\u2014a medium that has become the<\/em> cultural common ground for the vast majority of Americans. Television doesn\u2019t just keep us informed as to what is going on in the culture, it is culture.<\/p>\n Wallace wrote this essay in the mid-1980s at a moment when the literary world was clamoring for writing by the \u201cconspicuously young,\u201d writers like Jay McInerney and Bret Easton Ellis, whose fiction was, according to their detractors, as shallow and materialistic as the culture that informed it\u2014a vision of the world that was transfused through the glass teat of television.<\/p>\n According to Wallace, television\u2019s pablum of melodrama and crass mercantilism nourished a stylistic revolution among young writers, an \u201cultra-minimalism\u201d characterized by a \u201cdeliberately flat, understated, \u2018undersold\u2019\u201d tone, a kind of drug-induced catatonia that allows the writer to describe events at the \u201cemotional remove of light-years.\u201d<\/p>\n Though sympathetic, Wallace sees the ultra-minimalistic catatonic style as a pose, a facile belief that \u201csimply by inverting the values imposed on us by television and commercial film, advertising, etc., they can automatically achieve the aesthetic depth popular entertainment so conspicuously lacks.\u201d<\/p>\n Any depth achieved is more trompe l\u2019oeil than anything else, which, Wallace writes, makes us \u201cat once more self-conscious and less reflective\u201d\u2014more aware of the surfaces of things but less critical of our lusty satisfaction with them. Or, to put it another way, more fleshly and less modest.<\/p>\n This is where eschatological thinking is supremely important: it acts as a stay against the idea that, as Wallace writes, \u201cthe most significant feature of persons is watchableness<\/em>\u201d a quality usually indicated by a person\u2019s physical beauty or grotesqueness\u2014sometimes both.<\/p>\n In addition, the \u201ceternal\u201d episodic quality of television can the be reclaimed and subverted in such a way that the audience is empowered to think beyond the nihilistic horizon of the show or film by seeing it against the much larger world of experience beyond the soundstage\u2014transcendence.<\/p>\n If I were sticking to my original project of trying to weed out the darlings, I would return here to Wallace\u2019s smackdown of ultra-minimalism and how it opened my eyes to my own stylistic choices.<\/p>\n But I\u2019ve realized that his style is not the headline: it\u2019s his ability as an essayist to make us forget about him as the autodidactic dude, the literary persona\u2013and to focus us on David Foster Wallace the intellect, the soul.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u201cYou do not have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body.\u201d \u2013C.S. Lewis To be an artist is to be constantly dissatisfied. Many acclaimed artists have said this, and though not acclaimed, I identify. I have habit of sitting on projects for too long, afraid to let go until they\u2019re absolutely perfect, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1048,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[163,365,366,364,178,45],"class_list":["post-3362","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-david-griffith","tag-david-foster-wallace","tag-entertainment","tag-eschatology","tag-prose","tag-tv","tag-writing"],"yoast_head":"\n