The world's #1 David Foster Wallace fan and I discuss DFW Bros, Lauren Oyler, Patricia Lockwood, and the community of hardcore DFW fans that orients around the Wallace-L listserv.
Great convo. Not a huge DFW fan personally although I’ve read a decent amount. I think the backlash to him and his fans is partly a product of the revelations about his personal life and partly a broader sociological turn wrt gender relations and poptimism. Ironically enough they’re partially victims of what he describes in that Updike essay in Consider the Lobster. DFW is seen as a Great Msle Narcissist himself now, an exemplar of an extremely male strand of authors writing very highbrow, doorstopper novels for and about straight men. The great irony being of course that if you’ve read any of his interviews it’s pretty clear that DFW had a kind of troubled relationship with that tradition, and in a lot of ways saw what he was doing as fundamentally opposed to it.
I hope the cream will rise to the top over time. As I mentioned in the podcast, my DFW expertise is almost entirely in his nonfiction, and I find it hard to believe that people won't still be reading that in a few decades. Those two collections -- supposedly fun thing and consider the lobster -- are just so fucking good. Also I think they were hugely influential.
I think it will, definitely agree about the nonfiction, every second millennial essayist feels like DFW to me, and few do it as well. I do think the fiction will have its own legacy: people will still probably be reading Infinite Jest in 25 years, although where they’ll place it I don’t know exactly. Honestly Lockwood is probably onto something that the fiction feels more like the end of something than the beginning of something new. He does in a way fit in more with a kind of 20th century “male epic” fiction than what followed it, whatever qualifiers we might add. There is still an audience for that stuff though, so who can say?
Thanks for the convo. I both love DFW's work and am fascinated by the meta conversation about St. Dave.
However, I think there is an element to the latter discussion that is missed: DFW is (somewhat) right-coded to many modern readers yet his critical success is difficult to dispute. This creates some knee-jerk discomfort.
There are a number of reasons DFW has been construed as right-coded:
1) He was at least at some point a Republican/right-leaning voter - voted for Reagan and Perot
1a) He favorably profiled John McCain in 2000
2) His psychology, persona, and writing were tied to the American Midwest.
3) He was an outspoken defender of certain liberal values that are/were strongly right-coded: prescriptivism, individual agency, 1A stuff, etc.
Plus, I think it is hard to read his stuff and not see a particular ideological and cultural affinity with many previous liberals who moved rightward or were pushed rightward by political climate of the 2010s. The seeds of this are easy to spot in essays like "Authority and American Usage." In some ways, that essay can be read as a takedown of a large swath of progressive rhetorical tactics.
Interesting. I didn't know that about who he voted for. I knew he'd done that sympathetic McCain piece, which was one of my least favorite of his long essays (he didn't get McCain right). And that's a good point about "Authority and American Usage." It's not hard to imagine that if he were alive today he's be somewhere in the vicinity of Zadie Smith -- i.e. not writing a lot of explicitly polemical anti-woke stuff, but writing about it indirectly in a way that makes it clear where he stands.
I guess my assumption was always that he was a left liberal like me, but that have been my projection.
I also think Infinite Jest and "E Unibus Pluram" have a certain ideological affinity with McLuhan/Postman/Haidt/Twenge. Skepticism about the social and psychological costs of digital media (neo-Luddism) is strong among centrist/center-right liberals.
I read Infinite Jest about 15 years ago and experienced it as an emotional and intellectual tidal wave that swept over me. I definitely identified with Matt's experience of immediately wanting someone to talk to about it, but I didn't have the resources or the bandwidth at that time to engage in any online discussions, and none of my peers were very interested, so I kind of just had to sublimate that desire. Had I been 10 years younger, I wouldn't have had the good sense to do that. I remember as a younger guy always needing to foist every impactful media that excited me on everyone around me. My friends started asking me, when it was my turn to pick a film for movie-night, "Is this a Scott-movie?" (meaning, is it something weird and off-putting that you clearly like, but which we normal folk are not really up for?)
Eventually I gained the maturity and consideration to realize that what resonates with me does not resonate with everyone else, and that's fine, so I don't need to insist that everyone I like needs to experience this particular piece of art in order to be a complete person. But to me, a big piece of the DFW lit-bro phenomenon is just the fact that it tends to resonate powerfully with people who read it (at least, who finish it), its complexity, length, and subject matter make it kinda unappealing to a lot of other people, and young people (especially guys) tend to lack the discernment of who else might enjoy the thing that they do. So what you end up with is young guys who loved Infinite Jest and earnestly want to share it with people who are important to them, but don't have the emotional intelligence or self-awareness in their stage of maturity to realize that it's not a character flaw to be disinterested in something that you, yourself, think is revelatory.
edit: I also think that the reason this has appeared more in the last 10 years is that there's a lot less social tolerance for male emotional immaturity than there was 15 years ago -- a phenomenon which I would argue has contributed to the alienation and radicalization of young men over the past decade.
I haven't listened to the podcast yet (will do so later), but one comment I want to make is about the proliferation of "-bros". There's the "litbro" that loves DFW, the "filmbro" that loves Tarantino, and the "theobro" that is theologically conservative. All of them get regularly dunked on in their respective fields. I wonder if this phenomenon can be analyzed more in depth in the context of declining male influence and increased female influence in all those fields, framed in the overarching fact that women outpace men in college degrees. What does the "-bro" phenomenon say about modern conceptions of masculinity in a managerial-class environment?
Yeah it definitely is a symptom of something, at a minimum the waning influence of men in various realms. I had never heard of a "theobro" but that's amusing. It seems to me like dubbing someone a bro, or coining a something-bro concept, is certainly a power move, a way of jockeying for status within a given sphere.
I have similar feelings about it to my feelings about the whole "mainsplaining" thing, which is that on the one hand it does seem to be diagnosing something real -- there are a lot of men out there who mansplain -- and at the same time it is an incredibly broad brush insult that also ends up denigrating men who are just enthusiastic about shit, which should be a good thing.
Great convo. Not a huge DFW fan personally although I’ve read a decent amount. I think the backlash to him and his fans is partly a product of the revelations about his personal life and partly a broader sociological turn wrt gender relations and poptimism. Ironically enough they’re partially victims of what he describes in that Updike essay in Consider the Lobster. DFW is seen as a Great Msle Narcissist himself now, an exemplar of an extremely male strand of authors writing very highbrow, doorstopper novels for and about straight men. The great irony being of course that if you’ve read any of his interviews it’s pretty clear that DFW had a kind of troubled relationship with that tradition, and in a lot of ways saw what he was doing as fundamentally opposed to it.
I hope the cream will rise to the top over time. As I mentioned in the podcast, my DFW expertise is almost entirely in his nonfiction, and I find it hard to believe that people won't still be reading that in a few decades. Those two collections -- supposedly fun thing and consider the lobster -- are just so fucking good. Also I think they were hugely influential.
I think it will, definitely agree about the nonfiction, every second millennial essayist feels like DFW to me, and few do it as well. I do think the fiction will have its own legacy: people will still probably be reading Infinite Jest in 25 years, although where they’ll place it I don’t know exactly. Honestly Lockwood is probably onto something that the fiction feels more like the end of something than the beginning of something new. He does in a way fit in more with a kind of 20th century “male epic” fiction than what followed it, whatever qualifiers we might add. There is still an audience for that stuff though, so who can say?
Thanks for the convo. I both love DFW's work and am fascinated by the meta conversation about St. Dave.
However, I think there is an element to the latter discussion that is missed: DFW is (somewhat) right-coded to many modern readers yet his critical success is difficult to dispute. This creates some knee-jerk discomfort.
Elaborate on the idea of him as right-coded. I'm not wholly sure I know what you mean.
There are a number of reasons DFW has been construed as right-coded:
1) He was at least at some point a Republican/right-leaning voter - voted for Reagan and Perot
1a) He favorably profiled John McCain in 2000
2) His psychology, persona, and writing were tied to the American Midwest.
3) He was an outspoken defender of certain liberal values that are/were strongly right-coded: prescriptivism, individual agency, 1A stuff, etc.
Plus, I think it is hard to read his stuff and not see a particular ideological and cultural affinity with many previous liberals who moved rightward or were pushed rightward by political climate of the 2010s. The seeds of this are easy to spot in essays like "Authority and American Usage." In some ways, that essay can be read as a takedown of a large swath of progressive rhetorical tactics.
Interesting. I didn't know that about who he voted for. I knew he'd done that sympathetic McCain piece, which was one of my least favorite of his long essays (he didn't get McCain right). And that's a good point about "Authority and American Usage." It's not hard to imagine that if he were alive today he's be somewhere in the vicinity of Zadie Smith -- i.e. not writing a lot of explicitly polemical anti-woke stuff, but writing about it indirectly in a way that makes it clear where he stands.
I guess my assumption was always that he was a left liberal like me, but that have been my projection.
I also think Infinite Jest and "E Unibus Pluram" have a certain ideological affinity with McLuhan/Postman/Haidt/Twenge. Skepticism about the social and psychological costs of digital media (neo-Luddism) is strong among centrist/center-right liberals.
I read Infinite Jest about 15 years ago and experienced it as an emotional and intellectual tidal wave that swept over me. I definitely identified with Matt's experience of immediately wanting someone to talk to about it, but I didn't have the resources or the bandwidth at that time to engage in any online discussions, and none of my peers were very interested, so I kind of just had to sublimate that desire. Had I been 10 years younger, I wouldn't have had the good sense to do that. I remember as a younger guy always needing to foist every impactful media that excited me on everyone around me. My friends started asking me, when it was my turn to pick a film for movie-night, "Is this a Scott-movie?" (meaning, is it something weird and off-putting that you clearly like, but which we normal folk are not really up for?)
Eventually I gained the maturity and consideration to realize that what resonates with me does not resonate with everyone else, and that's fine, so I don't need to insist that everyone I like needs to experience this particular piece of art in order to be a complete person. But to me, a big piece of the DFW lit-bro phenomenon is just the fact that it tends to resonate powerfully with people who read it (at least, who finish it), its complexity, length, and subject matter make it kinda unappealing to a lot of other people, and young people (especially guys) tend to lack the discernment of who else might enjoy the thing that they do. So what you end up with is young guys who loved Infinite Jest and earnestly want to share it with people who are important to them, but don't have the emotional intelligence or self-awareness in their stage of maturity to realize that it's not a character flaw to be disinterested in something that you, yourself, think is revelatory.
edit: I also think that the reason this has appeared more in the last 10 years is that there's a lot less social tolerance for male emotional immaturity than there was 15 years ago -- a phenomenon which I would argue has contributed to the alienation and radicalization of young men over the past decade.
I haven't listened to the podcast yet (will do so later), but one comment I want to make is about the proliferation of "-bros". There's the "litbro" that loves DFW, the "filmbro" that loves Tarantino, and the "theobro" that is theologically conservative. All of them get regularly dunked on in their respective fields. I wonder if this phenomenon can be analyzed more in depth in the context of declining male influence and increased female influence in all those fields, framed in the overarching fact that women outpace men in college degrees. What does the "-bro" phenomenon say about modern conceptions of masculinity in a managerial-class environment?
Yeah it definitely is a symptom of something, at a minimum the waning influence of men in various realms. I had never heard of a "theobro" but that's amusing. It seems to me like dubbing someone a bro, or coining a something-bro concept, is certainly a power move, a way of jockeying for status within a given sphere.
I have similar feelings about it to my feelings about the whole "mainsplaining" thing, which is that on the one hand it does seem to be diagnosing something real -- there are a lot of men out there who mansplain -- and at the same time it is an incredibly broad brush insult that also ends up denigrating men who are just enthusiastic about shit, which should be a good thing.