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🦋 Connective Tissue
In the video that A White Bear linked yesterday, Mark Leyner is asked his thoughts about the audience he's writing for; he responds to the effect that he does not think about audience at all -- writing for him is an obsessive activity like chess for Bobby Fischer, with no object other than the text. David Foster Wallace takes exception to this:
Sometimes it's an act of communication. What makes the analogy ok but also makes it break down, is that
part of the Fischer-like obsession Mark's talking about consists in a kind of mental and emotional dance
with a constructed reader that you figure has a life more or less like yours, and whom in a weird way
you're talking to. Again, I'm like totally with you about 50% of it; the thing about it is that the
light and fun and all that stuff is definitely, that's part of what makes art magical for me; but there's
another part. There's the part -- and I'm afraid I'm going to sound like a puritan or a critic -- but there's
this part that makes you feel full. This part that is redemptive and instructive, where when you read something,
it's not just about -- you go "My God, that's me!" you know, "I've lived like that, I've felt like that, I'm
not alone in the world..."
I felt excited listening to Wallace saying this because it matches up with some things I have been thinking about since last year, specifically to describe my experience of reading Pamuk and more broadly as a way of talking about art in general -- I wrote a brief note about this last November. A White Bear says, Wallace is grasping to understand the possibilities of art as transformational, connective tissue between all these lonely people. For most 20th-c writers, that possibility is a sentimentality that died out around the time that Romanticism did. I want to find out more about this idea in a Romantic context. Were Romantic authors making this argument explicitly or is it something critics read into their work -- or is it an argument made by Romantic critics? And which ones? It's an argument I've been grasping around at for a while and it would be really useful to hear it from someone else's mouth.
 Update: and I guess obviously, duh, this is a strong sign that I should read Wallace's essays and criticism. Will get right on that.
posted morning of Monday, September 15th, 2008
➳ More posts about David Foster Wallace
➳ More posts about Readings
➳ More posts about Jonathan Franzen
➳ More posts about Identification
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