Infinite Summer: Morbid? Culturally Imperial? Morbidly Culturally Imperial?

Am I alone in finding the whole idea of Infinite Summer a little morbid?  The renewed interest in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest is an obvious Good Thing—a first step toward popular as well as academic canonization—but having lived through the recent Michael Jackson Media Event, I can’t help but wonder whether the desire to read Wallace’s novel is akin downloading Thriller because Some Important Someone died.  Do I sound like I’m thwacking some straw man with shovel?  Because I’m not:

I have a confession to make. I don’t even like David Foster Wallace. And I don’t mean that I found Infinite Jest too lengthy on the first run-through. I mean his accessible stuff. His tales from cruise ships and lobster festivals and tennis matches and radio studios . . . So why am I here?

The short answer is that David Foster Wallace died.

That’s Ezra Klein, writing at A Supposedly Fun Blog.  I’m not complaining because famous bloggers (Matthew Yglesias and Julian Sanchez among them) are horning in on my territory—although I will note that the first thing I ever published online was a mediocre seminar paper titled “Demand and the Appearance of Freedom: The Role of Corporate Media in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest,” but only just to note it—nor, despite the above, am I really even complaining that Klein’s interest was piqued by Foster Wallace’s suicide, as a more charitable excerpt shows his interest to be far less morbid:

The slightly longer answer is that David Foster Wallace died and I cared. That was, to me, a surprise. Lots of people die. Just the other day, Ed McMahon died. It hardly registered. But Wallace was different. I read everything I could about his final days. I posted a memoriam on my site. I watched readings on YouTube. It affected me. I don’t know if it’s because he was a young writer who was felled by the violent bubble and froth of his own mind and that a small part of me relates to that. I don’t know if it’s because he was, in some way, unique to my generation, and as such, one of my own.

In the end, what’s interesting about the 25-year-old Klein’s post about the 46-year-old Foster Wallace’s novel is the notion that someone who was 18 years old when the Clash first performed in America and someone who was 18 years old the year Joe Strummer died can be said to belong to the same generation.  How does that work?  I’m tempted to blame it on the Internet:

Once you could identify someone’s taste by the cut of their concert tee—London Calling vs. Combat Rock, The Clash vs. Operation Ivy, Operation Ivy vs. Rancid, &c.—now that all these these bands (mostly) belong to the past tense, they’re part of that enormous cultural pool from which more recent generations sample freely.  For example, someone Klein’s age will never experience the pain of the endless, fruitless search for something like the first Clash album (which, contrary to that link, has not been in print continuously since 1979), as CDNOW was in decline during his formative years.  To people for whom almost everything has always been immediately available, the idea of what constitutes a culturally-determined generation is bound to be a little fuzzy. 

Note that I’m not criticizing Klein for being born in a time of cultural plenty—I would rather not have spent the better part of a decade searching for this in vain—I’m merely pointing out that his inclusion of Foster Wallace among his contemporaries dumbfounds me . . . unless I chalk it up to the novel instead of the man.  Wallace might not be Klein’s contemporary, but Infinite Jest could be.  Now that I’m reading it again, I’m struck by how contemporary it feels.  Everything that annoyed me about it in 1996 still annoys me now—the footnotes, subsidized time, the too-frequent self-indulgent sentence—but everything that felt new in 1996 still feels new now.

Given how we imagine ourselves into an intimacy with our favorite authors, it makes sense for people twenty-five years younger than Foster Wallace to feel a generational affinity for him on the basis of his novel; but that doesn’t really work, now does it?  I mean in the academic sense, the means by which we identify Author X as belonging to Period Y and analyze his or her work in light of the aesthetic of Period Y.  We don’t, in other words, seriously consider historical feelings of contemporaneity the way we experience our own, inasmuch as I’m fourteen years younger than Foster Wallace but, like Klein, count him as “one of my own.”

(x-posted.)

Comments

[Jake]

I was recommended his big book twice, but only felt motivated to read it once he self-slaughtered. Yeah, it's all a little morbid.

[ZIRGAR]

I think the affinity one feels for a certain piece of art once it has been appropriated supercedes or maybe transgresses the temporal boundary that says there is distance between artist and admirer, especially in a chronological sense, and binds them together in an onotological sense. The space created by great art is atemporal, therefore there is the genuine possibility of an interpretation whereby one joins into a kind of contemporaneity and even a simultaneity with both the art and the artist...or not.

[moria]

I (also twenty-five) read Ezra's comment as meaning something more along the lines of "unique as a cultural artifact to my generation," and thus one of my own. Wallace is something that is consumable as a cultural monolith, first and originally, to our generation. Infinite Jest was new in 1996, yes, but it is our own now. None of that seems strange to me. Literary time is never immediate. Death seems almost a necessary impulse of its non-immediacy.

My first real memory of pop culture: we all - ten, eleven years old - rushed to buy old Nirvana records when Kurt Cobain died. It was a good thing. We learned. We experienced. It was raw and sad and good.

Now, as maturing intellectuals, we consume Infinite Jest in the wake of Wallace's death. It is similarly raw and sad, and similarly good.

[Vance Maverick]

Or, perhaps more simply, not being pop, literature moves more slowly. To whom does Gertrude Stein feel archaic?

[Sisyphus]

Arrrgh!

I _liked_ the idea of Infinite Summer and came _this_ close to buying the novel except I felt too guilty about my various stalled writing projects and was sure that I'd avoid them by throwing myself into the book. So mleah!

Isn't the cool part of this idea that it would be creating a community through shared experience? (both the death and the reading --- or I should say the mourning and the reading --- both of which are usually so solitary.) I mean, except for your Mr. Morbid example there.

[Jake]

Sisyphus: yes! Now that I remember, didn't Scott like how the book brought "us" together (even if it was narcissitic to think so). Also, I didn't know there were things that annoyed Scott about the book.

[SEK]

I was recommended his big book twice, but only felt motivated to read it once he self-slaughtered. Yeah, it's all a little morbid.

Especially when you put it that way.

I think the affinity one feels for a certain piece of art once it has been appropriated supercedes or maybe transgresses the temporal boundary that says there is distance between artist and admirer, especially in a chronological sense, and binds them together in an onotological sense. The space created by great art is atemporal, therefore there is the genuine possibility of an interpretation whereby one joins into a kind of contemporaneity and even a simultaneity with both the art and the artist...or not.

If you're saying what I think you're saying, then yes, one way of looking at art is as something that transgresses temporal and cultural boundaries (think Shakespeare in Nigerian theater), but I don't think that same logic holds for contemporary cultural artifacts. I'm not sure judgments of greatness really stick to contemporary literature the same way they do to properly canonized works, which is why I brought the Clash up: in 1979, they were another hyped punk band that might amount to something, but by 2001 they were, in essence, "punk classics." (The mind reels at that phrase, but you catch my drift.)

I (also twenty-five) read Ezra's comment as meaning something more along the lines of "unique as a cultural artifact to my generation," and thus one of my own. Wallace is something that is consumable as a cultural monolith, first and originally, to our generation. Infinite Jest was new in 1996, yes, but it is our own now. None of that seems strange to me. Literary time is never immediate. Death seems almost a necessary impulse of its non-immediacy.

If you're saying that Foster Wallace comes to you pre-canonized, I see your point. I had to argue him into respectability, but now his greatness is taken for granted. I hadn't thought of it like that, but I suppose the same dynamic that I outline in my response to ZIRGAR obtains here . . . I'm just so old I didn't even notice. If you'll excuse me, I'm going to go mourn my youth in the corner now.

Or, perhaps more simply, not being pop, literature moves more slowly. To whom does Gertrude Stein feel archaic?

Depends on what you consider literature. I mean, have you read Coupland recently? His '90s material absolutely feels archaic.

Isn't the cool part of this idea that it would be creating a community through shared experience? (both the death and the reading --- or I should say the mourning and the reading --- both of which are usually so solitary.)

Absolutely, except the book and the mourning seem all tangled up in untoward ways here, which is my only caveat. (Also, what Jake remembered I'd said. I like having a distributive memory. Makes life so much easier.)

I didn't know there were things that annoyed Scott about the book.

You have to love a book to be earnestly annoyed by it, otherwise it just goes into the unread/unreadable bin.

[SeanH]

I'm 21, and conceived an interest in David Foster Wallace only after his death (in fact the reports of his death and various obits across the internet were the first I'd heard of him at all). All I recall hearing was that various voices across the 'net whose opinion I respected spoke of Wallace as a genius and Infinite Jest as a work of genius; and being somewhat starved of literature at the time (I was living in Korea from a period shortly after Wallace's death) I decide to order that book online.

Infinite Jest quickly consumed my life. I do not think it was the first serious work of literature I read (my tastes run to the fantastic and science-fictional, but certainly there is overlap, as with Banks, Mieville, Le Guin, Dick...) but it was the first to really engage me, to demand a level of attention and involvement that previously only Aristotle, Nietzsche and Kierkegaard had warranted (I am a once-and-future philosophy student, in case that comes off as unbearably pretentious). It is still, probably, the best book I have ever read. The only thing that comes close is that volume of Borges' collected fictions.

My best friend is an English Lit grad and was delighted to see me finally engage with a work of literature (I have an illustrious former career as an sf/f nerd who dismisses all non-genre fiction as "adultery in Westchester"), and her promptings about Infinite Jest's resonances with other works (Madame Psychosis/metempsychosis in Ulysses, the decidedly Pynchon-esque character names, et al) have sparked in me a desire to learn more about this wonderful form that I've apparently been missing out on all these years. So that is Infinite Jest's, and DFW's, legacy for me - without him I may never have noticed an entire universe. I actually plan on reading Ulysses next. Big leap for someone whose tastes had never been any more challenging than Robin Hobb.

Also, now I watch tennis. Andy Murray's through to the semis!

[Matt]

I read David Foster Wallace's commencement speech given at Kenyon Collge. I was deeply impressed and forwarded it several of my friends, who were likewise deeply impressed, and we exchanged a series of letters about it. Now, as to "Infinite Jest" -- I have begun reading it twice, and twice I have stopped short of the half-way point. Why? Not because it was too "difficult" or that I found the prose impenetrable or because I couldn't fathom (most) of what was going on. I stopped because more important tasks call to me. Tasks with rewards for self and others. Activities in the sunshine. Good books to read. I won't invest the requisite time and effort in tracing through this tedious and self-involved novel. "Ulysses" it ain't.

[Martin Wisse]

My objection to this project is much more basic and less interesting: it's yet another bookreading project that makes reading into a chore rather than a pleasure.

[chris]

We see our own cultural moment with a microscopic focus no one else ever will, though. "In the academic sense," I think we would be perfectly comfortable saying that Emerson's Nature and Leaves of Grass--separated by a whopping 19 years, if my math is right--have a shared cultural and philosophical substrate, even though a lot happened between 1836 and 1855 (easily as much as happened between '96 and '09). This is not even to mention that Infinite Jest, you know, "takes place" close to 2009. Without daring to assign some superhuman prescience to Wallace: Citi Field? Skype? I don't think it's any great surprise the novel might feel entirely contemporary to readers who were barely literate in 1996.

[va]

...and he started writing it in 1991, with a draft submitted in '93.

Maybe IJ feels contemporary because 1993 is the year it always is, according to that Michael Berube.