dfw ... nobel specks (mildly off topic)

[Paul York]

DAVID ALAN BUUCK (or is it t. bartleby jones?)wrote:

[major snippage]

  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.

Actually, I think that maybe this impulse has been not so much a 
"modernist" impulse as it has been an impulse of the novel in general 
since the _Quixote_.  IMHO _Infinite Jest_ looks just as much to 
Cervantes and Fielding as it does Barth, Coover, or Pynchon.

I don't know, the word "postmodernist" really yanks my chain in an 
unpleasant way.  The most interesting thing that can be said about it is 
that no one seems to be in exact agreement as to what works or writers 
fall under this heading.  At best, its yet one more way for academics to 
categorize and compartmentalize their endeavors du jour, so that you end 
up with conference roundtables on "Postmodern (Re)Visions" or papers 
with titles like "Postmodern Love:  Television and Disconnection in 
DeLillo and Pynchon."  At worst, its a badge of elitism, whereby works 
are nominated to the ranks of "postmodern" by virtue of their 
demonstration of (what academics see as) an intellectual rigor or 
sophistication.  You know, the books that lots a people just don't seem 
to be able to "get."  But, I pontificate...

That said, I hope the era of Faith in the Big Book isn't behind us.  I 
like books I can set my car on when I'm rotating the tires.  Okay, so 
Size and Scope of ambition may not be everything (I'm also a fan of 
poetry, which nowadays is generally small and only moderately ambitious) 
but I'm glad to have a novel like _IJ_ that's so huge and expansive, if 
not in the way _GR_ is huge and expansive (or M&D -- still only half way 
through it), then at least in the way that Fielding's _Tom Jones_ is 
huge and expansive.

As for DFW seeming

> 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.

sounds like he's covering a good cross-section of TRP's readership to 
me.  (Alright, alright, before anybody flames me, I know his readership 
is much more wide and varied than that, but Pynchon, as do DeLillo, 
Coover, [insert name of author who writes books people don't get] etc. 
do have their cadres of hipper-than-thou, see-right-through-it-all, 
know-what-fiction's-about, 
gonna-go-to-grad-school-and-write-a-2000-page-novel-with-parallel-text-in-esperanto types.)  But I think _IJ_ does offer a critique of 
contemporary America that is not in the least bit ironic (in fact 
there's an interview with him from a few years back in the Review of 
Contemporary Fiction (which may be the same issue that features William 
T. Vollman) in which he has some not very nice things to say about the 
whole current cynicism masked as irony game that permeates much of our 
culture today, including, I would add, not a few novelists of more or 
less his generation).  IMO _IJ_ has sincerety out the wazoo.
 
Is it in the same league as Pynchon?  Not yet.  But then _V._ probably 
would not be given the credit it is today if Pynchon hadn't been able to 
follow it up with CoL49 and GR.  Like you said, only time will tell.

Feeling logorrheic and neglectful of his duties,
	Paul "What? I thought this was the Wallace list" York