{"id":2413,"date":"2010-07-08T08:01:14","date_gmt":"2010-07-08T16:01:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/?p=2413"},"modified":"2015-06-16T08:12:44","modified_gmt":"2015-06-16T16:12:44","slug":"david-foster-wallace-on-surreal-lit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/2010\/07\/08\/david-foster-wallace-on-surreal-lit\/","title":{"rendered":"David Foster Wallace on Surreal Lit"},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve been reading parts of David Lipsky\u2019s book-length interview of the writer David Foster Wallace, Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself<\/a>. Tragically, Wallace (1962-2008) suffered from depression, and he hung himself at the age of 46.<\/p>\n

The interviews in this book were done back in 1996, when Wallace was only 34, and at a high-point, having just published his thousand-page novel, Infinite Jest<\/em>. Originally the interviews were going to serve as source material for a long profile in Rolling Stone<\/em>, but the article got cancelled.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Lipsky\u2019s lines of questioning don\u2019t always seem perfectly perceptive, but, hey, the interviews were done on the fly, and Lipsky wins Wallace\u2019s confidence and gets him to talking. See the New York Review of Books review<\/a> for some critical thoughts. Some of interviews could just have well been edited out\u2014Lipsky had to stretch his material to get a book out of it. But I found a lot of good stuff. In his afterword, Lipsky does the signal service of giving us a real sense of sympathy for Wallace\u2019s final struggles to stave off his depression and stay alive.<\/p>\n

Wallace has always interested me\u2014in 1987, I was one of the reviewers who praised <\/a>his early novel, The Broom of the System<\/em>. His magnum opus Infinite Jest<\/em> changed my life\u2014even though I skimmed over the sections about tennis. And years later, in 2004, I wrote a harsh review <\/a>of his nonfiction book Everything and More<\/em>, which was about Georg Cantor and infinity. There were in fact some good things even in that book, but for me it was spoiled by factual errors and by a rushed ending that fails to pick up on what I consider to be the most interesting aspects of Cantor\u2019s work. A better editor might have been able to save the book.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a lot more of my thoughts about Wallace and his writing in my earlier post, \u201cDavid Foster Wallace, Oblivion<\/em>\u201d\u009d.<\/a><\/p>\n

One of Wallace\u2019s stylistic innovations was his use of a casual slacker\u2019s spoken-English tone in much of his prose. He wasn\u2019t the first to do this\u2014the use of a street-voice-narrator plays a part in the success of Salinger\u2019s Catcher in the Rye<\/em>, and this kind of tone also pervades Philip K. Dick\u2019s Scanner Darkly<\/em>. I often like to use this style myself, and it\u2019s not as easy as it looks.<\/p>\n

The passage in Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself<\/em> that popped out hard at me is where Wallace is discussing his reaction to David Lynch\u2019s movie, Blue Velvet<\/em>, and his subsequent thoughts on realist and surrealist literature, which are a very close fit for my own thoughts along these lines when I talk about transreal science-fiction (as in my recent podcast<\/a>). I\u2019ll just quote some Wallace excerpts here (taken from pp. 170-172 of the Lipsky book).<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

And there was somethin\u2019 about\u2026it was my first hint that being a surrealist, or being a weird writer, didn\u2019t exempt you from certain responsibilities. But in fact it upped them. And the magic of Blue Velvet <\/em>was that it so clearly<\/em>\u2014I mean I\u2019ve got this whole theory that you don\u2019t want to hear about. That Lynch is really an expressionist <\/em>in the way that like Cabinet of Dr. Caligari <\/em>is expressionist. Or that he\u2019s very much about manifesting his inner states on the film, and it\u2019s actually a very sick thing that drives him to make films.<\/p>\n

\u2026 it\u2019s just one of those little off things in every frame, that instead of seeming gratuitous or stupid or pretentious, actually makes those frames mean a whole lot. It was my first realization that there was a way to get at what those realist guys were saying, that was via the route of the surreal and expressionist.<\/p>\n

And I think one of my\u2014I mean, I\u2019d always used sort of dreamy stuff. But I had never as a young writer realized that you still had an obligation to make a kind of narrative. That really the goals of realism and the goals of surrealism are exactly the same. And they\u2019re indescribable. But they\u2019re two completely different highways that have the same destination. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

<\/p>\n

Adios, King.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve been reading parts of David Lipsky\u2019s book-length interview of the writer David Foster Wallace, Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself. Tragically, Wallace (1962-2008) suffered from depression, and he hung himself at the age of 46. The interviews in this book were done back in 1996, when Wallace was only 34, and at […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2413","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2413","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2413"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2413\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6118,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2413\/revisions\/6118"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2413"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2413"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2413"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}