by Ben Jeffery
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Among the gifts possessed by the late David Foster Wallace was a genius for talking about writing, a talent that allowed him to perform exceptionally well in a role I suppose authors now find it difficult to avoid, that of the apologist/justifier/defender to literature’s continued existence. In an interview on Michael Silverblatt’s Bookworm radio show in 2006, Wallace gave a good account of the challenge a modern artist faces unpicking her voice from the culture at large:
it seems to me, having been born in 1962, and having grown up without any memory of a life without television, for example, is that in fact what we have when you talk about stuff like the ethical or moral dimensions to art, is we really have what appear to me to be two different problems who are related in complicated ways. One is the classic one of just deciding (the writer decides the way that all of us have to decide): what is it to be a human being? To find some way to make an accommodation with being an individual and being self-centred, but also being part of a larger group, and loving some people, all that stuff. But then the other concerns appear to me to be more rhetorical or technical. Something that doesn’t get talked about very much in any era I know of up ‘til maybe the postmodern, is that these are also public documents and works of art that are not meant simply to be expressive, that are not meant simply to be spontaneous effusions from an individual soul, they are also communications and pieces of art that are designed to please, gratify, edify, whatever, other human beings. So that you’ve got not just what’s true for me as a person, but what’s going to sound true? What’s going to hit readers, or music listeners, or whatever; what’s going to hit their nerve-endings as true in 2006, or 2000, or 1995? And it seems to me (I may have a kind of pessimistic view of it) that the situation, the environment, in which nervous systems receive these communications is vastly more complicated, difficult, cynical and over-hyped than it used to be. The easy example is that, and one that I go through over and over with students in writing classes, is that these students are far more afraid of coming off as sentimental than they are of coming off twisted, obscene, gross, any of the things that used to be the really horrible things that you didn’t want to betray about yourself. The great danger of appearing sentimental is that sentimentality is mainly now used in what appear to be very cynical marketing or mass-entertainment devices that are meant to sort of manhandle the emotions of large numbers of people who aren’t paying very close attention. So that some of the most urgent themes, or issues – how to deal with mourning the loss of someone you love very much? – have been so adulterated by sort of treacly, cynical, commercial art that it becomes very, very, very difficult to think about how to talk about it in a way that’s not just more of that crap.
The contempt for art in Houellebecq’s novels is more than just an interesting logical inconsistency (how can art be anti-art?), it’s also part of what makes the books so pertinent. In lots of ways, cynicism (and by extension, pessimism) about art is not only very easy now, it’s reasonable. Some of the causes of this are relatively shallow, and some are deeply serious and complicated, but they all bend back to the elemental difficulty of finding justifications for art. But then again, isn’t it basically superfluous to ask for a good reason for art to exist? Evidently people go on being creative and enjoying art without having well worked-out theories about why they do so, and you’d be hard pressed to deny that whatever the mechanisms of creation and aesthetic enjoyment are, they run deeper than conscious rationale. Indeed, theoretical justifications for art tend to look silly or pretentious, sooner or later, because they intellectualise what seems instinctive (possibility this is a mark of philosophy in general). What could be more natural – more human – than creativity? But, as Wallace says, one of the real difficulties at the moment is that we’re given so many good reasons to be guarded and self-conscious and generally wary of our instincts when it comes to aesthetics. This is a trouble every sort of art faces, although perhaps it’s easier to appreciate in literature, since fiction is already so naturally inclined towards self-consciousness and doubt.
What is it about the world today that makes justifying art harder than it might be? Keep literature as our example. As well as the issues described in the last chapter (of scale and fit) there is a more insidious third trouble for writers, or rather a nest of closely-related troubles, to do with the saturation of culture. Novelists encounter a world not only overloaded with information but overloaded with novels, possibly overloaded with novels confronting the overload of information. On an immediate social level, the enormity of published work has the effect of isolating readers. The general dispersal of culture into fragmented and miscellaneous units in the information-age has a more pronounced effect on literature, if only because novels typically take longer to read than films take to watch or albums take to listen to. It takes comparatively more effort to know about the same things, therefore it’s less common. The upshot is that it is more difficult to get the kind of basic social-reinforcement around literature that merges individual interests into a scene or community that people want to belong to, which is one of the main reasons it’s now such a challenge for writers to fix coordinates for their work. The mass of already-existing fiction feeds back into the process of writing in other ways, too. For a start, it stresses the importance of relevance and engagement – because if all the reader wants is ‘a good read’ there is already enough unsurpassable writing to fill up lifetime upon lifetime. But the difficulty is that being relevant and engaged would seem to require some minimum level of (rather unforgiving) self-consciousness, since one of the big informing worries of a working novelist has to be that there is already far too much to read. Really, it’s the problem for art since modernism began: because the world has a superabundance of art, art with designs on relevance is under tremendous pressure to take this super-abundance as its subject. Except this results in predictable loops of anxiety and self-consciousness, since if the topic to engage with is the overdose of information and fantasy, how can adding more information and fantasy (in the form of art) possibly help?
Connected to this – and what’s maybe the most dispiriting problem of all for an artist trying to justify herself – is the peculiarly insulating effect that cultural overload has on our aesthetic perceptions. Like a lot of the phenomena associated with the term ‘postmodernism’ the causes and effects of this insulation seem very diffuse and hard to put into words, but one fairly straightforward example of what I mean is the clash between life as art presents it and life as it is experienced. Typically (in the course of twelve episodes, or one hundred and twenty minutes running-time, or three-hundred pages, or whatever) narrative art gives us images of lives more vividly felt and wholly eventful than our own. There’s nothing sinister about this. Dramatic compression is a practical necessity – audiences won’t usually allow themselves to be bored. It’s just that the more of this colourful stuff you take in, the harder it is to avoid the thought of how relatively mundane and colourless your own existence is compared to all these interesting people onscreen and on-page. I doubt this idea, even should it occur, is the cause of too much grief for the average well-adjusted adult, because after all it’s just books/movies/TV shows we’re talking about, there’s no need to take them seriously as ideals for living. For an artist or for someone wondering about why art is worthwhile, however, this sensible qualifier tumbles into a more worrying question: how, then, should narrative art be taken seriously? Or must it always be kept at an ego-preserving distance? What makes it more than just an aesthetic concern is the fact that narrative art (of any variety) transmits not only entertainment, but also values. Stories send messages about the goodness of love and the badness of evil and everything in between. They provide models of behaviour for us to evaluate. All this is obvious enough, and equally obvious is that to become numb toward stories is to risk becoming numb to their attendant questions of value. Saturation creates a type of ‘aesthetic filter’ in the consciousness, a thickened awareness of how, for e
xample, grief is transformed (through performance and repetition) into ‘grief’, love into ‘love’; how, as the world becomes more dense with cultural product, real life seems to somehow absorb the character of a staged fake.5 Which sets up a punishing formal obstacle for artists and critics: how to preserve the notion that art is a channel for genuine, informative, life-defining values and principles, whilst protecting said values from the tranquilising effect of art in a culture overdosing on aesthetics?
This dilemma, left untreated, ends up generating huge amounts of disappointment and cynicism (essentially just disappointment, fortified) in artist and audience alike. It simply becomes harder to trust the messages art sends, which then leads directly into all those unpleasant, endless misgivings about whether art can ever be trusted, given that artwork is always manipulative and false to some extent. Consider the distinction between commercial and non-commercial art Wallace alludes to in the interview quoted above. One interesting aspect about the treacly, manhandling sorts of art that he mentions is that being able to recognise their tricks is frequently no defence against them. The swelling string music at the climatic moment in a movie, the soaring key change in a song – it’s easy to feel yourself bullied into an emotional response even when you know perfectly well how mawkish and manipulative the thing you’re responding to is. This reaction is actually double-faceted: on a first-level, there is the quasi-forced emoting, and, on a second, resentment; both at the art for manipulating you and at yourself for being so open to manipulation. (Isn’t something very similar often true of advertising – an initial, impulsive desire for the idealised situation or person on show, which is hard to eradicate precisely because it is unconsidered, or rather, pre-considered?) The natural defence-mechanism against this is cynicism. You protect your integrity by assuming an intellectual distance from your immediate emotional reaction. For the artist, though – supposing the artist wants to make her audience emote, but in a way that is somehow more sincere and serious than commercial art – the problem becomes how to go beyond the ‘soft-spots’ that commerce so ruthlessly homes in on. This is difficult, firstly, because the reason commercial art is made to zero in on these triggers is that they work, powerfully and indiscriminately, that’s how money gets made. So it seems as though the artist has to strike some balance between finding effective ways to inspire a response and foregoing the reliable techniques that commercial art uses, lest their work become just more of the very treacly, manipulative pap that makes people so cynical. Achieving that balance is tricky enough, but then the next thing all of this does is induce another dose of malignant self-consciousness. Because it might easily occur to the artist that once an element of cunning is introduced to the work, once you start thinking about the best way to go about that work if you want people to think of you as genuine and not cheap, you’re already failing. Naturally you want to seem like you’re working from the heart. However, seeming sincere is crucially removed from being sincere – certainly if it’s you doing the seeming, you thinking about the best way to seem, then it begins to exhibit an awful lot of the hallmarks of lying. In which case, what makes the artist’s work more virtuous than the commercial stuff they don’t want to be mixed up with? It’s a problem Wallace illustrated by way of the old televisual oxymoron of ‘acting natural’. The very best actors work as if the camera isn’t there, but of course there’s nothing natural about it. It’s an incredibly sophisticated, considered, and difficult-to-do masquerade. Being (actually) natural on camera is hopeless. Without training people freeze up, speak haltingly and generally look extremely stupid – and so faking is necessary to make any positive impression at all. As such, the worry about how to separate oneself from disingenuous culture can wind up producing even more cynicism about the possibility of being artistically honest, authentic, and non-fake.
At one point in Atomised, Michel Djerzinski muses: ‘A lie is useful if it transforms reality… but if it fails, then all that’s left is the lie, the bitterness and knowledge that it was a lie.’ It’s not art he has in mind, but the analogy is easy enough. The fraudulence of literature, say, could be ignored so long as you felt it possessed transformational power, either outwardly (to cause social change) or inwardly (to enrich the soul). But if these hopes are dismissed – because a novel won’t ever change the world, because there is no soul to enrich – then the question is: what’s left? The most obvious answer is ‘pleasure’. But this response isn’t as straightforward as it looks. No one would deny that art’s capacity to give pleasure is fundamental to its appeal, yet although pleasure is perfectly innocent in some circumstances, in others it can be demeaning, self-indulgent and hollow. In which case, what is it that separates ‘good’ pleasure from ‘bad’ pleasure? As Houellebecq might put it, not only is aesthetic enjoyment (in general) pathetically faint compared to the force of other, more basic appetites, anything valued solely in terms of individual enjoyment is logically self-absorbed. So for art to be more than a narcissistic exercise the issue can’t be simply whether or not it pleases, but also to what end it pleases, and how well – which casts us back into the problem of what, if anything, guarantees worth. Wallace described late-twentieth century America as a ‘confusion of permissions’, which applies. Technically, art has the freedom to be ‘for’ almost anything the artist likes (I can write this novel in favour of murder, you can paint a picture for political reform) but even these agendas take on the feel of superficial gestures, none more particularly serious than others. Artists become ‘artists’; their messages become ‘messages’, drained of substance.
Once again, the broad result of this is more disappointment, disenchantment and cynicism – none of which ultimately helps anybody. The only piece of long-form literary theory Wallace ever published, the essay ‘E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction’, took the history of post-war, postmodernist American literature as a case study in the poisonous effects self-consciousness cynicism had on art. From the 1950s onwards a family of American authors – including William Burroughs, John Barth, Robert Coover and Thomas Pynchon, among others – were united (whatever their differences) by the use of cynicism, irony and irreverence as tools to expose the distance they perceived between the myths of the American Dream and the realities of consumer capitalism; all the assorted big and little hypocrisies of American self-image. This sort of postmodernist fiction could be crudely defined as a marriage of the old modernist credo of formal innovation to pop-culture and mass-image, plus a certain learned irony (inherited from modernism, but exaggerated) toward its own status as literary fiction. The aesthetic shift into postmodernism parallels a moral shift into myth-busting: just as artists became more focused on exposing fakery in the culture at large, it was only consistent that they took more of an interest in the artifice of their own work. Fiction arrived loaded with non-linear plots, transgressive characters, topical references and allusions to mass-culture, so too waves of fiction about writers writing fiction; fiction commenting on its own fictitiousness; fiction employing ‘fourth-wall’ busting appeals to the reader (the title story in Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse (1968) is exemplary), in short, a lot of fiction that pin-wheeled its arms about how artificial everything was, up to and including literary fiction, in the post-atomic American experience. This aesthetic pretty clearly evolved, Wallace argued, ‘as an intellectual expression of the “rebellious youth culture” of the ’60s and ’70s’ – and so its eventual co-option into mainstream culture is roughly analogous to that of rock music, another example of how exciting countercultural trends can become tamed habits of consumption. Writing in 1990, Wallace identified the cutting-edge of postmodernist literature with a genre he called ‘Image-Fiction’: a kind of hyper-speed pastiche that mimicked the flutter of television, giving inner lives to Barbie-dolls, Walkmans, public figures and TV personalities; using ‘the transient received myths of popular culture as a world in which to imagine fictions about “real,” albeit pop-mediated characters’. The aesthetic of Image-Fiction might have
been more heavily immersed in mass-media, but the moral was still essentially that of postmodernist satire: to put the absurdities of modern America on show, to call attention to the power and extent of the hold of fantasy on popular imagination. The catch was that while Image-Fiction writers were correct to regard television (which Wallace used as a litmus for mass-culture) as the single greatest common denominator and sensibility-shaper in America, they missed the fact that by the mid-1980s TV had assimilated irreverence and ridicule so successfully into itself that, although parodies to the effect that popular culture was cynical, absurd, artificial, etc. might have been right on, they also became totally ineffective. Subversion reaches a dead-end once the prevailing cultural values are values of mockery, where mass culture is complicit with ‘high-brow’ counterculture in irony and trivialisation. A great example of this in practice is the weird idol-worship/mob-lynching contortions of the celebrity-press. (It’s not a joke when someone says that celebrity culture is beyond parody. How would you make fun of it? For being shallow, narcissistic, capricious, dumb? It isn’t from thinking it’s profound that people take an interest.) Far from shaking us out of our illusions, at this point satire ends up bizarrely reinforcing the status quo. So long as we can tell ourselves we don’t take it seriously, it’s okay to stay tuned.