The Elegant Variation: RIFFING ON DFW

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September 06, 2011

RIFFING ON DFW

I can't imagine at this late stage of the game that anyone needs me to direct them to Maud Newton's New York Times Magazine Riff on David Foster Wallace's influence on writing on the net, which has been lighting up Twitter, Facebook and the blogs. But in case you've been as hunkered down as I've been, I send it along, with a hearty endorsement of Newton's take. (I took another ill-fated crack at Infinite Jest a few months ago but foundered yet again. I fear I will fall into the Geoff Dyer camp on this one.)

Geoff Dyer, an essayist as idiosyncratic and perceptive as Wallace but far more economical, confessed recently in Prospect magazine that he “break[s] out in a mental rash” when forced to read Wallace. “It’s not that I dislike the extravagance, the excess, the beanie-baroque, the phat loquacity,” Dyer wrote. “They just bug the crap out of me. ” Wallace’s nonfiction abounds with qualifiers like “sort of” and “pretty much” and sincerity-infusers like “really.” An icon of porn publishing described in the essay “Big Red Son,” for example, is “hard not to sort of almost actually like.” Within a brief excerpt from that piece in The New York Times Book Review, Wallace speaks of “the whole cynical postmodern deal” and “the whole mainstream celebrity culture,” and concludes that “the whole thing sucks.” Nor is this an unrepresentative sample; “whole” appears 20 times in the essay, so frequently that it begins to seem not just sloppy and imprecise but argumentatively, even aggressively, disingenuous. At their worst these verbal tics make it impossible to evaluate his analysis; I’m constantly wishing he would either choose a more straightforward way to limit his contentions or fully commit to one of them.

Still, I will continue to try and grapple with DFW. His shadow is too long to ignore. I am not done yet.

Posted at 02:12 PM in Litlinks | Permalink

Comments

Maybe it says something about how little I read but I found Infinite Jest hypnotically fascinating.
Mind you I did digest it in two large chunks - a pause of a few months when I was about halfway through.
But I knew that I would come back and finish it when I got up the nerve.

Posted by: Steve | September 06, 2011 at 05:17 PM

On page 919 of "Infinite Jest" which at times has seems more like "Infinite Book," especially with all those not read yet footnotes. But, I have to say I've never read an author with as much long distance energy and creativity and scientifically weird but seemingly accurate stuff. At times he's repulsive, especially when, as he often does, refer to bodily functions, and as frequently the addictions of his characters, knowing exactly which of the myriad drugs he describes, their dosages, effects, and how they're injected or otherwise bloodstreamed, this very sentence running on like so many of his do, which shows the influence a writer like that can have.

Posted by: ward jones | September 08, 2011 at 07:47 AM

"Sincerity-infusers"!

I like it.

Posted by: Shelley | September 13, 2011 at 08:54 AM

It took me a while to be able to read Thomas Pynchon. But once I found "V", one of his earliest novels, I somehow "got it", and enjoyed reading his other major works.

I've never even tried reading DFW, but perhaps it's the same kind of experience.

Posted by: Niall | October 12, 2011 at 11:04 AM

I've tried to read and enjoy David Foster Wallace many times. He's a hack, but he has a complicated process and some pretty bold moves. He's much better than the simpering Jonathan Safran-Foer.

Posted by: Snowpyramid | November 01, 2011 at 12:29 PM

Painful to read, impossible to dismiss. Someone who took himself and his writing so seriously you thought: god, one day this thing is going to kill him. That's what I felt about his "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again."

Posted by: Sushma Joshi | January 02, 2012 at 05:58 AM

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The Elegant Variation is "Fowler’s (1926, 1965) term for the inept writer’s overstrained efforts at freshness or vividness of expression. Prose guilty of elegant variation calls attention to itself and doesn’t permit its ideas to seem naturally clear. It typically seeks fancy new words for familiar things, and it scrambles for synonyms in order to avoid at all costs repeating a word, even though repetition might be the natural, normal thing to do: The audience had a certain bovine placidity, instead of The audience was as placid as cows. Elegant variation is often the rock, and a stereotype, a cliché, or a tired metaphor the hard place between which inexperienced or foolish writers come to grief. The familiar middle ground in treating these homely topics is almost always the safest. In untrained or unrestrained hands, a thesaurus can be dangerous."

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The Elegant Variation

A Literary Weblog.
A Guardian Top 10 Literary Blog * A Forbes "Best of the Web" Pick * A Los Angeles Magazine Top Los Angeles Blog
"Really brave ... or really stupid" - NPR

September 06, 2011

RIFFING ON DFW

Comments

MY NOVEL

WORTHY READINGS

TEV DEFINED

RECOMMENDED

THIS GUN FOR HIRE:
Reviews & Criticism

SECOND LOOK

Categories

The Elegant Variation

A Literary Weblog. A Guardian Top 10 Literary Blog * A Forbes "Best of the Web" Pick * A Los Angeles Magazine Top Los Angeles Blog "Really brave ... or really stupid" - NPR

September 06, 2011

RIFFING ON DFW

Comments

MY NOVEL

WORTHY READINGS

TEV DEFINED

RECOMMENDED

THIS GUN FOR HIRE: Reviews & Criticism

SECOND LOOK

Categories

A Literary Weblog.
A Guardian Top 10 Literary Blog * A Forbes "Best of the Web" Pick * A Los Angeles Magazine Top Los Angeles Blog
"Really brave ... or really stupid" - NPR

THIS GUN FOR HIRE:
Reviews & Criticism