Paul Bryant's Reviews > Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

ON HAVING HAD IT WITH DAVID FOSTER WALLACE FOR THE MOMENT

Given that most of my goodread friends love DFW with immoderate, alarming gusto, this requires some kind of explanation.

There’s a direct parallel between DFW and James Joyce. They both tended perpetually towards the encyclopaedic. They were utterly indifferent to audience expectation - even to the modernist, avantgardish audience they themselves created. Their main books are vast, oceanic, limitless affairs. They appeared to wish to use eventually every single word ever admitted into the English language and a shedload of foreign ones too. You might say they were both insufferable know-it-alls. They had a delightful propensity for going off on rants or lists or ranting lists in their books - these are from the present book :

we called them Granola Crunchers or simply Crunchers, terms
comprising the prototypical sandals, unrefined fibers, daffy arcana, emotional incontinence, flamboyantly long hair, extreme liberality on social issues, financial support from parents they revile, bare feet, obscure import religions, indifferent hygiene, a gooey and somewhat canned vocabulary, the whole predictable peace and love post-Hippie diction

or

Lying there helpless and connected, she says her senses had taken on the nearly unbearable acuity we associate with drugs or extreme meditative states. She could distinguish lilac and shattercane’s scents from phlox and lambs’-quarter, the watery mind of first-growth clover. Wearing a corbeau leotard beneath a kind of loose-waisted cotton dirndl and on one wrist a great many bracelets of pinchbeck copper.

But there’s a difference between the ocean of Joyce and the ocean of DFW, or what I have observed of it. Joyce had a plan and he stuck to it. DFW, it seems, never sticks to the point in his writing (forever interrupting himself, subverting his own text with page long footnotes, or end notes, forever entangling us readers in his sperm-whale-sized syntactic constructions, forever digressing) because he wasn’t that sure there actually was a point. He thought there should be but he wasn’t sure he’d discovered it. He was an out of control noticing machine (that’s not my phrase). All of his writing is suffused with unbearable acuity we associate with drugs or extreme meditative states. It's like breathing poisoned air. He writes about “addiction” and “tennis” and “parental abuse” and whatnot, all daytime tv subjects. He was mighty literary power-drill cracking a nut. Not much left of the nut when he’s done. Not much of a nut to begin with.

I’m not saying the reason I love Joyce & unlove DFW is that Joyce was a general ordering a successful campaign and DFW was a lonely guerilla hacking through the jungle with a dead radio. One's heart lies with the guerilla, after all. But there’s also the matter of JJ’s gorgeous way with words and effortless humour. Even his fans may concede that DFW’s logorrhific outpouring is often ugly, deliberately ugly. And also that reading JJ & DFW is like attending a service at the Church of Giant Brains - there's a great choir, fab stained glass windows, but it's so chilly, and it makes you feel like an ant, a bad ant who does bad things.

DFW’s narrators are most of the time like a rat in a trap, ceaselessly whirling around in a confined space, hysterically looking for the way out, but there’s no way out of their own awful sensibilities into the world, and I can’t help but think that as his characters, so it was with DFW himself, never getting to the end of his own endless sentences until the day he just wrote a full stop and had done with it.

DFW's own motto might be from p247 of this book :

I’m aware of how all this sounds and can well imagine the judgements you’re forming

***

Note - two stars just for my own discomforting reading experience. I think it's a four star piece of writing. But I don't like it.