Before I start, I confess that I would love to read the Classic Comic of Crime and Punishment! as I've never been able to get past page 10 of the novel of same name (minus the exclamation point).Last night I read David Foster Wallace's review "Joseph Frank's Dostoevsky" (1997), in Consider the Lobster; And Other Essays, 2005.
I was pleased to read this because the "ironic distance" DFW talks about is what I named the Voice of the Sock Monkey, a few posts back.
--begin DFW quote--
"The big thing that makes Dostoevsky invaluable for American readers and writers is that he appears to possess degrees of passion, conviction, and engagement with deep moral issues that we––here, today––cannot or do not permit ourselves.
"...Upon finishing Frank's [biography of Dostoevsky]... I think that any serious American reader/writer will find himself driven to think hard about what exactly it is that makes many of the novelists of our own time and place look so thematically shallow and lightweight, so morally impoverished...
"Franks' bio prompts us to ask ourselves why we seem to require of our art an ironic distance from deep convictions or desperate questions, so that contemporary writers have to either makes jokes of them or else try to work them in under cover of some formal trick like ...sticking the really urgent stuff inside asterisks as part of some multivalent defamiliarization flourish or some such shit.
["sticking the really urgent stuff inside asterisks" is a reference to what Wallace does in this article.
For instance:
**Am I a good person? Deep down, do I even really want to be a good person, or do I only want to seem like a good person so that people (including myself) will approve of me? Is there a difference? How do I ever actualy know whether I'm bullshitting myself, morally speaking?** ]
"...Our intelligentsia
[footnote: 'which, given this review's venue {the Village Voice Literary Supplement}, means basically us']
distrust strong belief, open conviction. Material passion is one thing, but ideological passion disgusts us on some deep level."
---end DFW quote--
I'd say since DFW wrote this 13 years ago, that ironic or flouncy voice has increased as we've seen what disgusting fruit ideological passion can bear.
But I don't agree with DFW's summation that American writers/readers mostly don't deal with weighty themes.
I actually don't read a lot of novels, but I can think of many that do.
How bout, say, Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987)? Or some of Louise Erdrich's stuff. Tim O'Brien. Or Yann Martel's Life of Pi, which is about religious faith (though that's later than DFW's article).
DFW's lament "no one does X anymore" sounds like the petulant "no one understands me" (or "I'm bored... there's nothing to do").
I wish he'd made it more personal. I wish he'd dropped the "we" and talked about why HE has a hard time being straightforward about deep issues.Because he does. He deflects like crazy, and some of his stuff is a regular sea urchin of precocious flourishes.
Why, Mr. Wallace?
You tell us.
One way Americans took to writing/reading about deeply moral issues, in my lifetime, has been to retreat from the ideological and turn toward the personal: telling us about their traumatic experiences, for instance, in novels about child abuse or addiction and other highly personal concerns.
And then in recent years, a lot of that morphed into memoir, not novels (e.g. Anne Lamott's Tender Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith , 1999--she's a much better memoirist than novelist.)
Maybe DFW would discount those kind of writers as not being part of the intelligentsia? If he does, true, that leaves almost no one...
Dostoevsky's not unique in writing about important stuff. But he is rare in his ability to do it "without ever reducing his characters to mouthpieces or his books to tracts."
It's one thing to say writers/readers should care deeply "about the stuff that's really important". (We do.)
It's another to say we should write well. (Not so much.)
A lot of modern writers come on like jack-hammers or are otherwise poor writers (Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones--deep topic, crappy writing).
"...The thing about Dostoevsky's characters is that they are alive. ...His concern was always what it is to be a human being––that is, how to be an actual person, someone whose life is informed by values and principles instead of just an especially shrewd kind of self-preserving animal."
Writing well, thinking sharply, and caring deeply. That's a great idea.
But how many writers have ever been able to do that, in any time?
How many Dostoevskys have there ever been, anywhere?
Still, I like DFW's questions: are we/am I writing with all our/my passion, or are we/am I pulling our/my punches?
Why or why not?
Discuss.
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I know my tenses get mixed up here, as I'm adressing someone, DFW, who is my contemporary but is dead. I'm leaving it as is.
