dfw ... nobel specks

[DAVID ALAN BUUCK]

re: all this talk of nobels for trp.  i would be extremely surprised to
see it happen anytime soon.  while the nobel committee is much less
politicized than other lit prizes, there is definitely resistance to name
another american (much less a white male one) for awhile.  toni morrison
having just won and all.  Which is NOT to suggest that this is some PC
degradation of the prize standards, it is not, for there certainly are
deserving writers all over this planet worthy of the recognition (& $$).
TRP wil probably have to wait.  Also, his invisibility could be a problem.
Nobel almost didnt award BEckett in 69 cuz they were worried that he would
decline (as he had other awards), and after Sartre they didnt want that to
happen again.  some (not all) names bandied about in recent years for the
prize : Salman Rushdie, Gunther Grass, Milan Kundera, Joseph Skvorsky,
Christa Wolf, Ngugi wa Thiongo, Chinua Achebe, Gyorgy Konrad, Pram. Toer,
Mo Yan, Carlos Fuentes, Michel Tourier, Umberto Eco, Ishmael Kadore (sp?),
and that's just fiction.  All worthy and brilliant and important writers.  

Now, DFW... well, first off, he's but what? 33? so judgement needs to be
reserved I think.  on the whole, i would chime in with those who remark on
his acute cleverness, which i think is ultimately a dtriment, or at least
not sustaining.  some of his characters are more fleshed out?  maybe, so
what, look at delillo's in ratner's star, or a number of other po-mo
novels, the Concept of the Character as some Subjectivity deserving Depth
has come under alot of scrutiny in po-mo fiction.  only in delillo's
recent stufffor instance has he begun to really look at characters as more
than tropes.  likewise auster, compare his early to late.  DFW has gone on
record to state that he wishes to entertain, and is against any sort of
avant-gardism that he finds elitist.  ok, fine, but i think that this
helps us read him as what he is, a brilliant story-teller, tryin to figure
out what it means to live and write about it these days.  the comparisons
to trp are mainly publicist's wet dreams, and the industry (and critics'0
Wish to crown the next-big-thing, a new (great white male) hero to save
the novel, after mailer and TRP.  and he gives interviews!!  whereas
Delillo and others have gone on record claiming that TRP has set the
standard for their generation, I dont know the IJ has for mine.  Time will
tell, but I imagine that ours may no longer be the age of the Giant
Big-Wad-Blow of Expression, which seems to be more of a modernist impulse.
DFW is definitely a child of the first generation postmodernists such as
barth, coover, trp, et al, and is battling with and against them, but
clearly in their wake and tradition and Faith in the Big Book.  his
sentences are most like Stanley Elkin on caffeine, his mode is mostly
satire with efforts at warmth and something called "human emotion", which
shows up for the first time in IJ, or at least in DFW's earlier work it
seemed forced.  DFW knows everything, but i'm unsure if that's to his
advantage, if there's something missing, it that strange, intuitive,
unlearned, unstudied, "purity" of personal expression that somehow just
manifests itself in any great writer's work (as style, concn, conceit,
Form, ticks, whatever).  For those who still judge fiction in the US in
terms of Size and Scope of Ambition, DFW is a major player in his
generation, along with Vollman, Richard Powers, among others.  But i'm
unsure that there might not be other ways to approach an understanding of
m]what makes "great fiction." (more on this in another post...)  And of
course, it can be a matter of taste.  I find Barth shallow and too-clever,
and DFW in the same vein.  I prefer TRP and could probably "argue" that
preference, but it may just be sensibility and no more.  DFW does have
things to say, but seems (so far) to be interested in a very specific
realm of experience, that is, contemporary "postmod" life as lived by
middle-class, culturally educated, meta-ironic Americans.  TRP's reach,
needless to say, is much much wider, and thus has a greater grasp of
things such as international capital, technology, culture clash, etc.  and
History, or "history..."  But it shouldn't be surprising that DFW gets
more "play" than someone like Vollman, who is looking at third world
lumpen proles and the history of American/capitalist conquest.  seems
america wants to read about their own vain inane joys, even if Ironically
"critiqued" by a DFW, it's still "us" not them.  oh well...  IJ is
important, but i think the only Big novel to rival M&D this decade (having
admittedly not read Gaddis' Frolic) would be Gass's The Tunnel, which i
fear is of such near-perfect pitch Evil that few will read it.  check it
out, another Last WadBlow from a great white shark of High PostModernism,
where the gesture is still modernist, i.e., big ggrand great , or in
gass's words (he, like coover and hawkes, calls himself a modernist) :I
wish to rise so high that when i shit i wont miss anyone/."  still a good
book.  TRP, while a writer of Size, seems more generous than this in his
worldview, which is why he'll outlast barth and coover no doubt, and which
is one thing DFW does have in common with him.  ok, more later perhaps...

t. bartleby jones