Style & Content Must Match...But What's the Risk?

I can't think of a writer more staunchly dedicated to style without giving a damn about making the job easier or more difficult for the reader than William Gaddis, author of such surreal American classics as The Recognitions and JR.

Gaddis, 1975

David Foster Wallace mentioned that if any writer wanted to know who had inspired him most, in terms of style and voice, it would be Gaddis. And this is most apparent in Wallace's last book of stories, Oblivion.

Linguistic tics befuddle, challenge, and inspire the reader throughout in a way that drew both praise and criticism from reviewer and novelist Walter Kirn, who seemed to get caught between marveling and denouncing the work for its overstimulated, tweaked-out abundance of hyper-detailing language and description.

In other words, fiction-Wallace as usual. But with Oblivion, it's Wallace after a lifetime of experience. The language, at first obfuscating the narrative, transforms itself into the picky, obsessive, anxious interior landscape of the character, and it fits. It fits well. The hard reading is worth it. For fiction lovers, it's a book to pore over.

Yet, if the authorial hand is too apparent in the advanced stylistic cues, he is also absent from what we usually expect in short stories, where the writer makes the time pass with a clumsy kind of "Two weeks later" exposition -- or as Gaddis calls it below, "narrative intrusion".

But what is the risk in losing yourself in the particular pattern of consciousness of the character? You run the risk of alienating the reader. You take a chance at overshooting your level of talent. There has to be a profound, layered context by which to root and justify your stylings.

And, as Gaddis says below, if you don't have the ear for voice, you won't soak it up no matter how hard you listen, pay attention, or take "special measures" to acquire it.

Here is a nice cutout from an interview in 1982 provided by Biblioklept:

Style and content must match, must be complementary, accounting in part for a difference between the two books, though the lack of a conventional narrative style had already jarred a good many readers of The Recognitions when it appeared, as its hapless reviews show. J R was started as a story which quickly proved unsatisfactory, inspired- here’s the legitimate gossip—-by the postwar desecration of the Long Island village of Massapequa where my family had had property since around 1910, take a look at it now and you’ll see all the book’s worst hopes realized. In approaching J R as a novel, I was at pains to remove the author’s presence from the start as must be obvious. This was partly by way of what I mentioned earlier, obliging the thing to stand on own, take its own chances. But it was also by way of setting up a problem, a risk, in order to sustain my own interest, especially since the largely uninterrupted dialogue raised the further risk of presenting a convincing sense of real time without the conventional chapter breaks, white spaces, such narrative intrusions as “A week later . . .” How some of the writers I come across get through their books without dying of boredom is beyond me. As for what you call speech patterns, one is always listening and has got an ear or hasn’t, and without one, unless perhaps in dealing with an unfamiliar language and culture, no amount of your special measures like riding around on school buses will get you out of the swamp.

Is There Such A Thing As Reading Too Closely?

Is it possible to identify too much with the words and fantasies of others? Yet, how far can the writer, who should be the most voracious of readers, take the act of close reading and identifying himself with the text before it goes too far and becomes an exercise in therapy?

Unless you think within all the pages of illusion and literary feats there might be lurking the perfect passages to define you, pinpoint your struggle, and somehow soothe the deepest aching of your soul.

That's what it seems David Foster Wallace did with parts of his reading life. In an interesting article written by Mike Miley called Reading Wallace Reading we learn an important, if not murky and hard to grasp lesson about the role of fiction, and every writer should define what it is or isn't about storytelling that attracts him.

It may not be all it's cranked up to be. Fiction can be a friend or a mirror for the ego, or an excuse to distract one's self from life, but when does it become a misleading factor in our lives? The Reading Wallace article talks about a passage from Don DeLillo, beside which Wallace wrote his initials DFW.

I think this passage helps me to see why I balked earlier at the idea of calling my quest in Austin a pilgrimage. These annotations are not holy relics because they restore nothing. Rather, they are simply the fears and obsessions of a damaged soul laid naked on the page, pushed to the margins but hardly marginal. A close encounter does not provide more salvation.

No one ever talks about how identifying with something you read might not always be a good thing. Saying “that’s like me” is not always an affirmation — it can be terrifying and make you feel “more fucked-up and Unknown.” Critics and fans alike rhapsodize about identifying with David Foster Wallace’s writing as though it can only be consoling and empowering, and I used to think so too, until I got too close and discovered what may be the most important truth about literature, the true “aesthetic benefit of close reading,” though I doubt the Mellon Foundation would be all that interested in hearing about my discovery, as it is beneficial only in the most cautionary of senses: there is such a thing as reading too closely.

It's almost like Wallace was looking for truths in other people's minds that he could attach to his particular quirks and personal suffering, as to give them a voice and an understanding. And yet, maybe he was searching in the wrong places? Some of the eerie silences within cannot be described in words.

What role does reading fiction play in your life? 

In Between David Foster Wallace & Bret Easton Ellis

And who cares, really, if Bret Easton Ellis sounds off on the late David Foster Wallace. For Ellis, it's an obvious act fitting with his character. Yet, having a literary stand-off can teach us a lot about writing styles, and how trends come and go. It can also teach us that at the end of the day, both men think (thought) too much of themselves.

credit: Camille Gévaudan

I revisited the heavy weight shooting match because of the sentimental DF Wallace movie, End of the Tour.

If Wallace represents (to a degree) bloated, overstimulated and sincere maximalist prose and Ellis the (kind of) cynical, somewhat minimal opposite, then we might understand ourselves as writers by determining where we best fit on the scale in between...assuming there is such a scale.

 An editor for both young writers named Gerald Howard, sums it up this way:

So there it was: two hot (sorry) young writers of about the same age, wildly different in style and temperament, inhabiting the same crowded literary space and clearly getting on each other’s nerves. I know that David envied the savvy with which Bret Ellis and his peer group handled the challenges of  a literary career – and castigated himself for that envy. Both fought hard and successful battles against alcoholism and substance abuse. (I watched both men at different times pound back multiple drinks in startlingly short order and each time thought, Uh-oh.) Both went on to publish culture-shaking novels. “American Psycho,” a macabre put-on that amplified every cliché about yuppie scum to Grand Guignol volume, created a firestorm when the literal minded (of whom there are so many) failed to get the joke. “Infinite Jest” transformed private torment into a vast metafictional diagnosis of our entertainment-bedizened cultural condition, and, weirdly, sounded the first notes of a quest for an irony-free sincerity that has become a ruling style of David’s generation and the ones that followed.

Howard suspects Ellis' rage comes from the realization that Wallace's "irony-free sincerity" style has dominated and is most prevalent today. Do you still find this the case in 2015? It's very difficult to describe the current landscape of fiction writing with any certainty unless you're lying about the width of your vision and reading capabilities. I do notice a lot of earnest, literal-minded plots churned out month after month from the big publishers.

I've read more Ellis than I have Wallace, but that's not to say I like one better than the other. Glamorama was my favorite of the former's, and Oblivion of the latter. If I were to reread either of the two authors it would be Wallace, and probably Oblivion that I'd choose. I wouldn't want to be stranded on a desert island with either American Psycho or Infinite Jest.