tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6436982786777942337.post2747314039946170787..comments2023-07-06T07:25:12.570-05:00Comments on Corresponding Fractions: On DFW's Workframikohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10274581567045478300noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6436982786777942337.post-31691824278983532112009-06-22T05:01:57.001-05:002009-06-22T05:01:57.001-05:00This last bit is very interesting to me:
"Wa...This last bit is very interesting to me:<br /><br />"Wallace was often accused of fashionable postmodern pretension, which inverts his potential vulnerability. Critics could more accurately fault Wallace for the kind of reactionary dogmatism associated with the late Tolstoy, whose turn to folk Christianity had a similar structure and motivation as Wallace’s valorization of AA."<br /><br />It's interesting in part because it describes my own surprise in coming to DFW's work expecting superficial literary fashion and finding not only deep compassion but also a willingness to engage questions of faith and meaning—a surprise similar to what I found upon first reading Saunders. It's sad to see such engagement labeled a "fault" or dismissed as "reactionary dogmatism"—though I haven't read enough of him to say that he never tips too far in that direction. I do know that Wallace was well aware of the problem. I thought he articulated it well in his essay on Dostoyevsky (in my mind a more dogmatic writer than Tolstoy), where he envies the Russian his freedom and confidence to take on the big philosophical questions of existence but without, it seems to me, regretting post-modernism and contemporary skepticism. I get the sense that he thought of post-modernism as a given condition from which to write—dangerous to give oneself to it completely and dangerous to pretend it had never happened. What he was after was not something reactionary so much as a synthesis through which we could all move forward. Maybe that's why he could be accused of being both a slave to the latest fashion and a reactionary ideologue? Maybe that's why, when I read the best of his work, I get excited about the writing—as if more were possible than I had imagined. (Which, come to think of it, is how I feel when I read Tolstoy.)Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com