He wasn't content to diagnose evil and despair, as so many modern writers have done; he was audacious enough to want to find, and give us, answers. In several of his essays he set forth a bold new artistic challenge for himself and his cohort of American fictionists. "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction" foresaw the aesthetic and humanistic dead end of postmodern irony and speculated that the next revolutionary literary movement might be fiction that risked sentimentality and melodrama and "advocated single-entendre values." In "Joseph Frank's Dostoyevsky" he explicitly set himself the daunting goal of following great 19th-century novelists' example of writing "morally passionate, passionately moral fiction [that] was also ingenious and radiantly human fiction." One got the sense that he was readying himself, like a great athlete in that last quiet moment of concentration and blankness before the crucial moment at the Olympics, for a feat of such artistic hubris it would demand everything he had, and more.
One of my favorite cartoonists, Tim Kreider, writes about David Foster Wallace (read the essay here).
Before last week, I'd never read any of Wallace's work. I once flipped through Infinite Jest at the bookstore and decided that I didn't care to steep myself in his style (I told myself I'd read too many copycat stories in writing workshops). And I'd also read James Woods's elegant assassination, in which he accuses Wallace of being swamped by the ugly language of the world.
Last week, I read his Kenyon commencement address. That, with the loving words of strangers, has made me want to try him again. But it's not until I read Kreider's essay that I realized what made me recoil from his writing. It's too exposing, too raw. It shows its flaws. How terrifying! -- to show the world your early errors for the sake of the wiser work to come. And now that wiser work will never arrive to justify its making -- we'll have to resign ourselves to looking for its traces in the partial drafts he left behind.
