The loss of David Foster Wallace on 12th September came shortly before Prospect was due to go to press, but we were fortunate enough to be able to call upon author Julian Gough to do some justice to one of the most dazzling, troubled talents of recent American letters.
In his Opinion piece, Gough looks back on Foster Wallace’s career and its painful self-cancellations: the universities that enabled him to write, but that stifled the writing he was able to do; the gifts of high comedy and high seriousness that set him apart from his peers, but that only rarely found the great subjects his talent deserved; his painful, painfully thorough self-awareness, which pre-empted both his own tragedy and his audience’s re-readings of his life. Let us know your thoughts below.
“But that culture (bad television, movies, ads, pop songs) is a snivelling, ingratiating, billion-dollar cur. It has to be chosen to be consumed, so it flashes its tits, laughs at your jokes, replays your prejudices and smiles smiles smiles. It isn’t worthy of satire, because it cannot use force to oppress. If it has an off-button, it is not oppression. Attacking it is unworthy, meaningless. It is like beating up prostitutes.”
Spot on, Mr. Gough. I think in some weird way DFW would have appreciated and enjoyed your article. I don’t know if it would have changed his mind, but I think it would’ve made him think, and I can think of no higher compliment.
An excellent perspective from the other side of the Pond. But in blaming the university system, it neglects the fact that DFW held a 5-year “genius grant” MacArthur Fellowship, which kept him in comfort and free from want, although he produced very little during those years. Literary suicides fall into two camps: those, like Disch and John Kennedy Toole, who got no attention at all, and those, like DFW, who got so much attention they couldn’t handle it.
“Attacking it is unworthy, meaningless. It is like beating up prostitutes.”
Not to mention pointlessly cruel and misogynistic. Why was this analogy used?
Julian Gough’s Wallace piece is combination of judicious and intemperate praise (with some implied blame, but of a sort that is so diffuse it might as well not have been limned; in point of fact Gough’s oblique obituary should probably been withheld for further reflection). I find myself in agreement with him about the noxious influence of the American university (and its homogenizing spawn, the writers’ workshop programs) as a home and public works project for writers and other artists. The omnivorous trope of “the university as universe” was being fabricated and flogged by John Barth years ago, and that outlook led Barth, who was far better when he was economical, to write a bloated and very bad big book, “Giles Goat-Boy”, a sort of unwittingly grim joke that should have been terminated at page 200 rather than 800. The university milieu had similar effects upon Wallace, and not only in his fiction. It is also the American university which has allowed a facile and prolix style of “analysis” to be applied to the detritus of popular culture, to the insane level of creating departments, disciplines and sub-disciplines out of the “pondered” junk, a sort of Thomism of inanity. If someone pays you to write this kind of fluff for a newspaper or periodical under the guise of everyday journalistic criticism, then you’ve made some money and kept the wolf away from the door without jeopardizing your soul. But to try to elevate it to the level of the serious, enshrined as such between hard covers, as Wallace sometimes did, is a big mistake, and another one of the perils of American academic life that deformed much of Wallace’s non-fiction writing. Good old Don DeLillo got this right in his parodic “departments” of Hitler and Elvis studies. (I could shred most of the pieces in “Consider the Lobster” (CTL) on this basis in ten thousand words or less, but this is not the time or place for that pruning exercise. An example of this professional deformation was most apparent in one of the tennis pieces Gough mentions, a CTL critique of sports autobiographies as invariably bland and disappointing. Wallace hints at what a successful version of such books might aspire to and achieve, yet his standards and goals in this respect seem preposterous and silly; as both a former athlete at a fairly high level of competition and a long-time sports spectator I smelled a phony exaltation and a completely misleading exegesis of athletics as soon as I started reading this essay. Its end was even worse.)
Wallace could not resist mucking up a solid essay in the interest of showing off his catholic mind (maybe he was just easily distracted). His essay on Joseph Frank’s four-volume critical biography of Dostoyevsky wrecked itself on this reef – a bright wiseguy’s inability to restrain himself from making remarks which might appear clever on first reading but are ultimately unwise and even vacuous at times. It evidences what might be called the “Desire To Be the Brightest Graduate Student in the Seminar Syndrome”– if I, in typical DFW fashion, plunked this down below as DTBtBGSitSS, you, as reader would be rather irritated after its second or third repitition, and rightly so. Wallace himself was obviously aware of this tendency and tried to undercut its pretensions with occasional self-mockery, but he often couldn’t help himself. In the essay on Dostoyevsky he would have done better to remove his meta-commentary on the relationship between DFW the writer and word-obsessed parents’ scion and the subject of his review altogether, especially his fake-naive running comments on “what about this Jesus guy?” as a gloss on Dostoyevksy’s and Tolstoy’s views on religion and ethics; the essay is also bogged down by the irrelevancies of remarks on trying to teach undergraduates about Russian novels of this era and the “failures” of some translators (Wallace’s observations on the sturdy old Constance Garnett translations were so unimaginative and pig-headed that I laughed when reading them). The surviving de-personalized article would have been much improved and would have actually directed the reader to the interesting world outside DFW’s head – the world of Dostoyevsky, Frank, and of Russian literature and history.
Wallace’s strengths and weaknesses as a writer are bundled together, and they are both formidable. It’s obviously too soon after his death to take one of those retrospective looks and canonical evaluations prized by the academy. But one immense mistake (understandable on an emotional basis) has been made by Gough in this respect: Wallace’s suicide in no way illuminates his earlier work, nor does it enhance its seriousness (or detract from its seriousness). No one knows if Wallace was “suicidal” years ago or if a tendency to be so was the driving motor of his writer’s sensibility. We might just as well say that Hitler’s persistent attitude of “all or nothing” (i.e., world domination or self-extinction) and his suicide retrospectively elevate his political career and “Mein Kampf” as an autobiography. Or closer to matters literary, that Hemingway’s suicide (heavily influenced by years of booze and prescription drug abuse) can be used to positively reassess the value of much of his later writing, which, to be frank, stank. By the way, Mr. Gough, although you obviously used literary license to arrive at your opening sentence’s claim about the percentage of people who will not read “Infinite Jest” right through to the end, it would have been more accurate (not to mention placing creative writing in a more telling perspective) to have stated that 99 percent of the world’s population will never have heard of Wallace and will, moreover, probably never have read a single novel to its end. This may have no bearing on Wallace’s size as a fish, but it does bring us back to earth regarding the size of the pond in which he swam.
Yeah, Terrence, and windbag commenters who love the sound of their own voice aren’t much better, okay?
Gough has written an astonishingly ignorant, patronizing piece of twaddle that will serve as a great reminder for me to steer clear of this magazine. Oh yes, look out for the ol devil weed, marijuana! Pynchon certainly never smokes — I guess weed is just mentioned in every one of his books by coincidence. As for the “death of communism,” never mind America’s well-document SUPPORT for fascists from Indonesia to Chile, apparently Gough doesn’t read the papers, or realize that the current “mortgage crisis” is ample reminder that as the Mekons (oh dear! pop culture! quick, someone smack a whore! (wouldn’t want to be Gough’s wife)) said, “This funeral’s for the wrong corpse.” And of course the university-battering, how original. Good thing there aren’t any sheltered, elitist, out-of-touch CEOs running the companies that just, well, kind of caused the current crisis. No word of predatory Adjustible Rate Markets, no word about the gross lack of help provided by the govt for the mentally ill. Nope, it’s those darn ivory towers! We should all strive to be more like the valiant (and talentless) Gough: ready to lay the blame where it will have the least impact, and above all, avoid the ganja. Ever drank ETOH, Gough? Cos it sounds like you wrote this after your very first beer….
Look at that syllabus. No wonder he couldn’t come up with much creative output on his own. So what I want to know is, if not the university, where? And where are these Borgias?
After his rather superficial review of Foster-Wallace work, Mr Gough can’t wait to offer a free pitch for the American neocon project of global domination as he writes:
“Modern America beat fascism and it beat communism. Death is the last oppressor left standing in America.”
If Mr Gough bothers to check the historical records of Europe, he’d find out that it was the brave Soviet Red Army who beat fascism by destroying the Nazi Wehrmachtin a protracted long war. He’d also find ou that America did not beat ‘communism’ but that the Soviet Union dissolved itself constitutionally.
Meantime, America has become a purveyor of fascism all over the world from Chile’s Pinochet and Colombia’s Uribe all the way to Georgia, Afghanistan and Iraq.In addition, it has pared own her own Bill of Rights, destroyed the separation of powers and became a purveyor of torture and Gulags.
Yes death is the last opressor standing in American as it carries out genocidal wars of resource pillage around the world and is the world’s leader in death executions in her own territory.
Julian Gough can go hang himself, and then we can hope someone will write: “Gough hanged himself at his home where he usually hung out,”
Two questions for Dale.
1) Aren’t websites seeking commentary and blogs actually designed for the purpose of letting us (old) windbags ventilate?
2) Could you overcome your trenchant pithiness to actually complete your observation. I.e., not much better than whom? Or what? Wallace? Gough? University writing programs?
Consider the Lobster? Sports “autobiographies”? The list goes on.
P.S. The recently deceased writer was an English teacher who would probably have given you a failing grade for lack of specificity. Okay?
I agree with everyone. Many fine points, splendidly expressed. I shall go away, brood upon them, and reform my character.
Thanks in particular, Chris and Donald.
John Kistner: You’re quite right, Pynchon obviously smokes far too much weed, bless him. (I think that was your point, correct me if I’m wrong). And nice Mekons reference. Given which, you might enjoy my satires of the capitalist system a little more than you enjoyed my piece on David Foster Wallace. I’d recommend The Great Hargeisa Goat Bubble:
http://www.juliangough.com/the-great-hargeisa-goat-bubble/
And John, Cristobal, don’t lose faith, there‘s hope for humanity. I’ve somehow managed to refrain from the brutal enforcement of my copyrights for just long enough to give you the products of my labours free. So, who knows, maybe there’s hope I’ll one day overcome my fascistic, wife-beating, death-squad tendencies too.
But, hey, Dale, lay off Terrence. He had a lot to say. I particularly liked his description of media studies as “a sort of Thomism of inanity”. If you don’t like it, scroll like a mutha.
Hanno (”Julian Gough can go hang himself”), perhaps I will, perhaps I will. Though not for another few weeks, I hope, as I have a novel to finish. On the hanged/hung controversy, may I direct those who care about the distinction (”hanged” for people who are killed by hanging, and “hung” for everything else) to this marvellous post from Goofy’s “Bradshaw of the Future” blog, earlier today:
http://bradshawofthefuture.blogspot.com/2008/09/hanged-hung.html
For those who don’t care enough to click, here’s a short extract:
“No reason is given for this prescription, and it is not usually followed anyway. Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage provides many examples of the words being used interchangeably, and concludes that if you observe the distinction, “you will spare yourself the the annoyance of being corrected for having done something that is not wrong.”"
The English language lives in the wild, and often doesn’t much resemble the stuffed version found in university English departments. As with lungfish and the beaks of finches, the form of the English language varies alarmingly from landmass to landmass. Indeed, in Ireland, especially down the country (and I am a Tipperary lad), you’d get a funny look for saying a fellow “hanged” himself.
But, more seriously, thank you for all your comments, it is a privilege to be read with such attention, and argued with so passionately.
-Julian Gough
http://www.juliangough.com
London, Tipperary, Berlin
I feel a little sheepish about having pitched in “too much too soon” after Wallace’s unfortunate death (unfortunate both for him and his family and for readers). And after seeing how Julian Gough has been mugged, recommended for self-extinction, and excoriated for daring to make critical remarks about university writing programs (the last embedded in a hilarious retrograde Marxist screed in which the quality of the writing reflects the quality of the thinking), I extend him my sympathies. Concerning “hanged” and “hung”, Mr. Gough’s enclosed language link actually taught me something new and useful, which contradicts the adage about old dogs and learning. As Gough intimates, D.F. Wallace had a gift for profligate language, contributing to its wildness. What irritated me (obviously) in the CTL essays were the constant second-guessing/mugging for the camera (or the classroom) and devices like the line-and-box diagrams and footnotes within footnotes. A wonderful parody of this trait might be done by someone like the late, great Flann O’Brien — one can imagine the crafty Sergeant McCruiskeen producing such footnotes until they become invisible and sensed only by him, so that he might produce further footnotes about reading invisible footnotes. Wallace, in spite of his recent silence, left a considerable pile for readers and critics to sort through, and they’ll be at it for a while. There are some gems in it.
I think Julian G should be heartily congratulated for his brilliant piece on DFW, all the more impressive for being written so soon after his death and so quickly. Well done Julian.
But I really must take issue with Terrence O’Keeffe’s absurd dismissals of the essays in Consider the Lobster. I’m sorry, but it it is just so easy, and so lazy, to make generalisations about writers analysing the ‘detritus of popular culture’, and to suggest that such things can’t possibly be serious. Of course they can! Orwell wrote about naughty seaside postcards. DFW wrote about porn and cruise liners. What’s the difference? (And to accuse DFW of some kind of inappropriate grandiosity in putting these essays ‘between hard covers’ is misleading, because most of the pieces in CtL were originally written for magazines.) But Terrence really takes leave of his senses when it comes to the review of Tracy Austin’s memoir, which is simply a wonderful piece of writing…I can’t see how anyone with literary taste can read that piece (which unlike a lot of the other essays in CtL doesn’t contain endless footnotes and is written in a fairly straightforward style) and not conclude that it is a great essay, the work of a genius etc - and that applies even to a ‘former athelete at a fairly high level of competition’.
Yes, his journalism is sometimes quite astonishingly original, and good. I wish I’d praised the journalism more in my piece, but it’s hard to say everything in such a short space - and at that, I overran the initial length I was asked for by 60%, in a modest, 1/16th scale tribute to his famously, fabulously, long drafts. I think he gave Premiere 20,000 words on David Lynch…
Well, back to the grind, thanks to Will Skidelsky. Having a thick skin I can take his remarks about my “absurd” dismissal of many of Wallace’s CtL essays with equanimity. As a reader of serious fiction and non-fiction for about 45 of my three-score plus X years, I trust my own judgment as well as anyone else’s, and my reasons for dissatisfaction with many of these essays are not based on knee-jerk reactions or some irrational animus directed at Wallace but on an actual analysis of the many flaws that plague the pieces in the CtL anthology. I can’t think of a more lax application of the word “genius” than to the DFW review of the Tracy Austin memoir and its kith and kin (basically it’s a very overinflated piece). I won’t reciprocate and accuse Skidelsky of absurdity on this point, but of just plain old bad judgment. Rather than irritate the other readers of this column I would be happy, through the offices of Prospect, to send him a much more detailed critique of the “sports autobiography” piece, presuming that he might find it of interest and even learn something from an old bird and, yes, former athlete (I’m referring to the 1960s here, so, as DFW would put when he “goes pop”, it’s “way former”). One other point — of course it’s possible for a good writer to produce interesting and even significant commentary about the chaff (detritus! drool! diminutiveness!) of popular culture; this does not vitiate the pretentious idiocy of the “professionalization” of pop-culture commentary within academic departments, whose clerisy emit a form of blather that has much in common with the products of “soft sciences” academic departments whose denizens often produce immense amounts of “the science of that which is not worth knowing about”. Keep in touch.
It is not true that “Death is the last oppressor left standing in America”.
By now we see that America itself is the last oppressor able to overcome the promise of America. Death is what we choose rather than see ourselves as we really are.
And the true, hard core of Wallace’s work might not be its engagement with depression, but more like an engagement to depression.
I’ve only read Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, and found the Q and A shorts brilliant expositions of the male mind, and funny as hell, especially the one about ‘the arm’ and the sadomasochism one. Running beneath the surface of the ’stories’ - the form is absolutely tops and the monologue pitched to an uncanny perfection - is a savage sympathy for the underdog. How can you not like the guy?
I thought that Gough did a decent, honest job - ‘beating up prostitutes’ - come on, guys, as Nabokov wrote in that foreword to Lolita, we are all adults here, we know what he meant! To seize on that one line and beat up Gough for that is nuts. It should be read in context.
And O’Keefe taught me some things, good things, and one of them was decidedly not to use the word ‘vitiate’.
Hey, thanks for the backup, Kajol. Very sweet of you. And Montag, hmmm… “America itself is the last oppressor…”? I think I know what you’re saying, and America certainly has been bending its promise into an interesting pretzel shape for the past few years (and then choking on that pretzel), but I’m also guessing you haven’t been to Chechnya, the Congo, or Tibet in the past few years.