New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani, known as one of David Foster Wallace’s most prominent detractors while he was alive, had — almost — only nice things to say about his latest posthumously published book, Both Flesh and Not.
The book cobbles together essays spanning Wallace’s 20-year career that (mostly) have not appeared previously in book form: a late-‘80s take on the then-young phenomenon of the young novelist as media star; two long pieces, written almost exactly a decade apart, about professional tennis; a relatively short piece from 1996 on heterosexual sensibilities amid AIDS’ devastation.
This last, titled “Back in New Fire,” is the one Kakutani singled out for disapproval, calling it “thoroughly offensive” in its assertion that along with desolation, the disease brought with it a “gift…[that] lies in its loud reminder that there’s nothing casual about sex at all.” At pains to point out he wasn’t saying AIDS was “a good thing,” Wallace nonetheless stressed the potential, in 1996, for a sweeping sexual revival that would “increase the erotic voltage of everyday life.”
According to biographer D.T. Max, Wallace’s editor counseled him not to consider ever reprinting “Back in New Fire” (originally published in Might Magazine).
Maybe it’s just that Wallace, now a full-fledged Dead White Male, lacks the street cred of the authoress New York Magazine once dubbed “the downtown princess of darkness.” In a 2005 interview at Nerve.com, Mary Gaitskill, who lived in NYC in the ‘80s, had this to say about the effect of AIDS on her social circle:
When it first appeared, it was terrifying. Like a medieval plague…It was like everything we thought we had triumphed over came roaring back…It was like a death figure just slammed a hammer down on everybody. Like, Oh yeah, you thought I wasn’t here? I’m not saying that’s what I really think, but it had that feeling to it. There was a period of ten to twenty years where you could have sex with impunity, with basically anyone you wanted, without feeling horribly ostracized — in New York anyway — without feeling like you were risking your life. That was very different than the rest of history, and suddenly everything was changed. We thought we were living in a world that was totally remade, and it wasn’t.
No one called Gaitskill out on her implication that, for her peers, AIDS represented repressed history reasserting itself with a vengeance. Yet her interview statements aren’t far from “Back in New Fire”’s Generation-X p.o.v., in which AIDS becomes a millennial update of the dragon of antique myth, which must be slain before the knight can enjoy his desired damsel’s carnal favors.
Wallace and Gaitskill are very different writers whose discrete artistic missions overlap in some pretty remarkable ways, as is evident throughout Both Flesh and Not. And because Wallace frets about the future (of fiction, professional tennis, cinema, etc.) in nearly every essay here, it seems apropos to point out that Gaitskill, in her own good time, is finishing what Wallace couldn’t.
Biggest difference between Wallace and Gaitskill, at least in the way these two writers are perceived: Wallace’s writing isn’t thought of as particularly sexy, whereas Gaitskill still can’t quite shake her ‘80s media profile as a sort of taboo-busting beatnik for the MTV age. But Gaitskill’s work has always been less “sexy” than infused with a powerful sense of physicality, of what it is like to live as a body. If it weren’t steeped in the rhythms and details of American city life, her prose would be downright earthy.
You can find on YouTube a video of Gaitskill delivering a lecture called “Why We Read,” where she says great writing “comes from the individual, idiosyncratic bo-dy…It has intimate understanding, including sub-thought, sub-emotional understanding.”
This echoes the upshot of “Federer Both Flesh and Not,” the essay on the Swiss tennis champ that leads off the new collection. Wallace writes that the beauty Federer brings to the sport “has nothing to do with sex or cultural norms. What it has to do with, really, is human beings’ reconciliation with the fact of having a body.” Which means, of course – though Wallace doesn’t say it, doesn’t have to say it – our reconciliation with mortality.
And this is why that so-easily-misunderstood aspect of Wallace’s work – his cliché-embracing, irony-decrying, ostensibly soppy side – really needs to be re-examined, like, now. Wallace wrote a lot about the “profundity” of clichés, especially in his non-fiction, not out of love of banality but because he recognized the cliché marks a sort of sacred place where language has the potential to exist without the suffocating self-aggrandizement of its speakers. Cliches are words worn smooth by centuries of crushing struggles with the Infinite, and it was those struggles, not the clichés themselves, that fascinated and inspired Wallace.
Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story, D.T. Max’s recent Wallace biography, ends by summarizing what’s known about how the celebrated author killed himself. Perhaps to dispel the morbidity a bit, Max intersperses a line from Infinite Jest – actually, from a scene in the very center of the book where a mute innocent is brutally murdered by terrorists seeking a weapon (of sorts) they think will unmake America: “[A]s he finally sheds his body’s suit, Lucien finds his gut and throat again and newly whole, clean and unimpeded, and is free, catapulted home…at desperate speeds, soaring north, sounding a bell-clear and nearly maternal call-to-arms in all the world’s well-known tongues.”
As befits his largely context-averse bio, Max doesn’t explain how the excerpt relates to the account of Wallace’s suicide beyond the fact that it too describes a death. But his instinct to include the passage was right-on. The Pentecostal image of a polyglot call-to-arms perfectly encapsulates what Wallace was all about. He waged war against cliché (pace Martin Amis) by activating the conflict within cliché: the human being grappling with the enormity of his/her own passions. And thus may we be reconciled.
Mary Gaitskill, for her part, has been working for some time to perfect a literary style that dips below the surface of cliché to capture the essence of soul-warping earthly experience. Her brilliant short story “Mirror Ball” (from the 2009 collection Don’t Cry) used the purity of the fairytale form to dramatize – unforgettably – the momentous consequences of what would seem from a distance to be a frivolous one-night-stand. Earlier this year, “The Devil’s Treasure,” an extract from the novel Gaitskill is currently writing, appeared at the Electric Literature site (http://recommendedreading.tumblr.com/post/27477039156/mary-gaitskill-devils-treasure). Building upon “Mirror Ball”’s fairytale allegorization of adult experience, the new story narrates a seven-year-old girl’s dreaming descent into Hell. It’s just a taste, but it lingers, catching you up in its ever-morphing series of vivid tableaux depicting, it seems, the destiny of all human desire.
If Gaitskill can sustain the tone and quality of “The Devil’s Treasure,” she may well achieve a new myth. And in doing so, render (even more) prophetic the closing lines of Wallace’s first published essay “Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young,” from 1988, the same year Gaitskill’s debut short-story collection Bad Behavior hit shelves:
It’s quite possible that none of the best [“Voices of a Generation”] are yet among the Conspicuous. A couple might even be…autodidacts. But, especially now, none of them need worry. If fashion, flux, and the academy make for thin milk, at least that means the good stuff can’t help but rise. I’d get ready.
From December, 2012