JOLLY DAYS

David Foster Wallace

In these Manichaean times everyone is trying to prove they are the “good” — the other side, well you know what they are. In the arts the dominant postmodernist stance: irony, detachment, conceptualizing the world — basing reality on words and the argot of specialized knowledge — is weakly countered by a retrograde earnestness that is supposed to take us back to a time that never existed. Postmodernism looks a lot like adolescent “cool” — the desire to seem not to care, so you can never be laughed at. Sincerity looks like a sucker bet in this world.

Not much of a choice.

Because postmodernist thinking is so dominant, it is interesting to see how a leading practitioner — the very bright David Foster Wallace — does in review.

Here is Walter Kirn of the NYT at the end of his review of a collection of stories by Wallace called Oblivion:

He [Wallace] has the vocabulary. He has the energy. He has the big ideas. He has the attitude. Yet too often he sounds like a hyperarticulate Tin Man. Maybe this is concentrated version of how we all sound lately. Data-dazed. Cybernetic. Overstimulated. Maybe this is the voice of the true now. Or maybe genius, like language, can't do everything, and maybe the Wizard should give the guy a heart.