Consider the Lobster
An aside on DFW: I did not care for Broom of the System at all, because I thought its thoroughgoing pomo-ness was nothing more than a ploy for DFW to sound smart and make a novel centered around Wittgenstein’s philosophy. His characters are cardboard cutouts in the same way Vonnegut’s characters are, but without any of the emotional resonsance that the latter chose deliberately to have characters like that. Vonnegut’s characters were “listless playthings of forces beyond their understanding”—Broom of the System’s were…expressly linguistic creations? It’s trying to grasp at something really abstract that is depressing in its cynicism—you’re just like a character in the book, don’t ya know, whose existence is mediated completely by language?—and not convincingly true. (I have a body unmediated by language, and this defines large parts of what I consider myself. Maybe this is news to a philosophy undergrad in his Cartesian solipsism.) There is no moment like the firebombing of Dresden to hang this idea. This has made me allergic to reading his fiction, and hence why, outside of it being a hassle and all to read a Big Important Book, I haven’t bothered to read Infinite Jest.
With that said, the DFW of his nonfiction does seem like a genuine, normal dude, smart and curious and a great tour guide of late 90s-early 2000s America, footnotes on footnotes notwithstanding. Maybe I have to give DFW a pass for Broom of the System since after all he was just an undergrad when he wrote it.
Up, Simba
Reading this in 2018 makes inescapable the comparison between McCain and Trump. Both were self-styled straighttalkers and no-bullshitters, in their own way. But the tension that DFW finds in McCain, between the parts of him that seem like the genuine article (being a POW at Hua Lo, his unwavering professionalism at town hall meetings) and those that make him seem like a calculating salesman (staging the phone call with the kid so that the techs can record the first 10 seconds of it only) Trump resolves in, really, an unprecedented way. Unlike Real Leaders who are also consummate Salesmen, Trump is only a Salesman. He seems not like a politician because to be a politician is to always live with this tension, regardless of whether you are a Real Leader or not. At that particular political moment, fresh with cynicism from the Lewinsky scandal, DFW found it hard to tell whether McCain is a Real Leader. What Trump showed us is that if you’re naked enough in your self-interest, naked enough in saying bullshit, you resolve this Leader-Salesman tension that so defines politicians that you seem to be a Leader to people even though you’re transparently just a Salesman, exactly because you seem so unlike a politician.
Is it because we’re in an unprecedented era of American politics? Is this an inherent flaw in democracy, that demagogues can get away with lying because they are so naked about their lying, untethered by moral compunction or any sense of decency, that this gives them an advantage over regular politicians who might bother with such things? Is the worry over partisanship and decency just pearl-clutching, complaints made by people who are themselves responsible for the degradation they are lamenting (Democrats; anti-Trump Republicans like Ben Sasse) or have we truly lost something valuable and ineffable since the 2016 election cycle? Perhaps it’s both? For the same reasons DFW found it hard to tell whether the McCain is the genuine article or not, I find the answers to these questions elusive.
Both Flesh and Not
Continuing discussion of DFW in general, since apparently I’m just going to read all of his nonfiction this week. His writing has an everyman quality that makes it so fun to read. It’s like hearing some regular dude, who might be a bit persnicketty with grammar and form, bullshit about whatever. Reading his essays is like smoking with the college roommate you wish you’d had.
His style---teeming with Latinisms, initialisms, and of course those damn footnotes---is inimitable and immediately recognizable. It’s not like he’s writing in the Academese that he so despises---his style is not as highfalutin or muddy as that. But it does betray a kind of hyperliterateness that still positions him as being above the reader. It stands in tension with the otherwise everyman quality of the writing. Maybe DFW really is just quite particular about his writing form, and that inhaling the dictionary really just makes the first word that pops to his mind longer than usual. In which case, though I find it a little distracting, still doesn’t really deter from the content too much. Or maybe he wrote like this deliberately: but for what reason I can’t countenance.