This article was originally published in
Proxart Magazine, Spring 2012. Get your copy here.
Joseph Conrad spoke English as a third language after Polish and French, and like Henry James, dictated aloud many of his later novels (as I learned many months ago in one of Christopher Hitchens’ symptomatically caustic Vanity Fair articles). Conrad had high expectations of his readers, at least in his early works. He required patience, curiosity, and a deep capacity to feel the emotions his characters were simply incapable of experiencing or identifying. For Conrad, the reader was an ineluctable part of the work. The reader, after the writer and the text, was the third dimension—the dimension of depth.
Modernists, and later Postmodernists, went wild with this idea, and spent the latter three quarters of the 20th century toying with their audience in increasingly technical and artificial ways. (Resist, if you can, the urge to think of the word “artificial” pejoratively—that is, after all, where we get the word art: from artifice). Accordingly, Joyce obscured his greatest work, Ulysses, in the tumults of its characters’ banal and trivial thoughts, “burying his story,” as the critic Edmund Wilson points out, “in the virtuosity of his technical style.” Such criticism could easily be applied to that school of Modernism that followed suit, among them Woolf, and later Faulkner. By the mid-century, the tradition of eschewing form and structure was even being applied by writers to the anti-structures put in place by the early Modernists. Beckett abandoned the heavily referential, highly stylized “realism” of his predecessor Joyce, opting instead to tell his stories through the brutality of heavily psychological, dystopian fantasy worlds. The reader, as is often the case in Modernist and Postmodernist art, had to oblige him his wild eccentricities or get out of town.
By the early ‘90s, one would have thought that audiences would be tired of such impositions of style and structure (or anti-structure), but this is not the case. What followed in the culmination of the century was the same sort of polarized reception that had been going on since the beginnings of Modernism. Only six years after the release of Thomas Pynchon’s baffling 1990 novel Vineland—which was hit hard in the media, not for its typically obscure style, but for its radical politics—the release of David Foster Wallace’s run-on novel Infinite Jest was greeted with, among its detractions, heaps of exorbitantly positive reviews, comparing him in style and ambition to none other than Thomas Pynchon. Wallace elicited the same sort of polarization that came from the release of Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow in the early ‘70s: People either liked being fucked with or they didn’t, and it was easy to make an impassioned argument for either case.
I, for one, like to think of the demands of a difficult writer as a challenge. (Take the word “difficult” as you will). I take pleasure in burying my emotions and preconceptions as far into the work as the artist will let me, and then trying to come back to the surface unscathed. This cycle of absorption and detachment, while enriching, is certain to leave scars and will instill emotional and intellectual hurdles that are not easily surmounted. After I finished Infinite Jest, which took me a solid month of reading, I was unable for some time to read ambitious literature—and that is the quality that I’m trying to get at here, ambition. It’s what characterizes all of Infinite Jest’s thousand-odd densely-packed pages. The novel, like Vineland, like Ulysses, is weighed down with ambition. Infinite Jest, for all of its failings and shortcomings (and there are many) demanded all of me, and when it failed at the end to culminate, when it faltered so massively at its climax, given the inertia and weight of the thousand pages that preceded it, I faltered too.
What resulted can’t be described as the inability to write, but rather the lack of desire to do so. The great failure of Infinite Jest—and it is a great failure—left me intellectually and creatively impotent. Why, I found myself asking, would anyone want to write something like that? Something so massively sad and disappointing. Why would someone do that on purpose? Harder still than granting Wallace the liberties his novel asked of me was trying to avoid being sucked into the cult of the late author, who committed suicide by hanging in 2008. When an artist kills himself—Elliott Smith, for example—it’s too easy to read everything they’ve written as a suicide note, and paint them as sad, misunderstood saints. With Wallace this is especially easy, and especially dangerous. An artist can only ask of you what they have themselves given to their work, and they will certainly ask it. Ambition, at its worst, can be a very sad, very scary thing.
As people, as readers, as consumers of art, we must all arrive at meaning through struggle, through fought-for understandings, and through failure—and artists create meaning the same way their audience does. I stopped seriously reading Conrad many years ago when I found that his insight into history could only bring me to places of darkness and cynicism. Similarly, I gave up on Joyce and Wallace because I couldn’t continue to worship at their altars, and that’s what they were asking of me. The key for readers, and for artists, is to know when to stop digging a particular hole, to know when to get off the train and start over.
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