tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8470094.post8407128547177668398..comments2024-03-18T16:55:31.971+00:00Comments on This Space: The gift of writingStephen Mitchelmorehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01658772259307446873noreply@blogger.comBlogger12125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8470094.post-50041246029564344382011-03-19T18:22:04.911+00:002011-03-19T18:22:04.911+00:00Chris, I have not finished a book by David Foster ...Chris, I have not finished a book by David Foster Wallace as whenever I have tried to read one, it didn't hold my attention. This post contrasts him with a writer who suffered similarly and managed to write "a work that maintained itself in the actuality of suffering". If you're saying he does that, then maybe I should try again.Stephen Mitchelmorehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01658772259307446873noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8470094.post-79190673070846218012011-03-19T16:00:40.533+00:002011-03-19T16:00:40.533+00:00If you don't see that Wallace engaged with suf...If you don't see that Wallace engaged with suffering in an ontological or metaphysical way, you must be reading a very different author than the David Foster Wallace I've read. Suffering is at the heart of most of Wallace's fiction, his supposed position of "privilege" notwithstanding (there's almost author about whom this argument can't be made relative to another).Chris Lotthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04302107867489292016noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8470094.post-67758042624716201852009-10-09T02:09:35.826+01:002009-10-09T02:09:35.826+01:00I came to this post via your most recent one, and ...I came to this post via your most recent one, and while I think I've read it before, I clearly didn't read it carefully, because I realise now it clarify's something of why DFW's work always left me cold: not the supposed 'coldness' brought on by 'postmodern games' but rather a coldness brought about but a lack of engagement with suffering in the ontological or metaphysical way the Pavese describes. Wallace's work is 'about' suffering, often, but he approaches as as societal diagnostician, that is, from a position of privilege.<br /><br />It as, as you gesture towards in your recent post, something that is all over American fiction, this constant engagement with a society whose contours can be mapped, can be represented by fiction, whether the writer sees that society as comprhensible in a 'realist' meanner, or whether it (because of television or whatever) is a welter of unconnected transvaluations that can only be reconciled with the meta-narrative of a 'book'.<br /><br />Bernhard's work, or the work of his narrators, is engaged precisely in a rejection of the role of diagnostician: they understand only that they do not want to understand. To clear away the dead wood and isolate the factor of suffering is futile too, as Bernhard knows. And that is the sufferer's terrible dilemma: to finally isolate sufferring in the hope of assuaging it is to be left only with futility.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8470094.post-22861981763419947912008-10-13T11:35:00.000+01:002008-10-13T11:35:00.000+01:00Edmond, it's not so much that I'm agnostic about t...Edmond, it's not so much that I'm agnostic about the links between biography and work (its form as well as style), but that the debate misses what interests me most: the space opened by the work.<BR/><BR/>As biographical prurience / criticism tends to be practised by the least literary of literary types (I can name at least one in British arts coverage), the question has always been one way: how has a life influenced the work? Reverse the question and it might provide more interesting answers (particularly as we all share the work).Stephen Mitchelmorehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01658772259307446873noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8470094.post-53565195824560305372008-10-13T00:25:00.000+01:002008-10-13T00:25:00.000+01:00Hi Steve:That's just the way I took it, that you w...Hi Steve:<BR/>That's just the way I took it, that you were wondering aloud, and looking at the way that the current crop of biographical remarks about DFW got extended into those speculations about the links between his illness and his style. I didn't think your remarks departed from what I took to be a kind of agnosticism on your part when it came to making direct links between writers' lives and their works. I just tossed in my 2 cents on that sub-topic as part of my overall appreciation of yet another thoughtful post.Edmond Caldwellhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02651618912907453630noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8470094.post-3894259660045609072008-10-12T13:20:00.000+01:002008-10-12T13:20:00.000+01:00There were no Foster Wallace's on the shelves of F...There were no Foster Wallace's on the shelves of Foyles last week - a "space" that as you rightly point out, may actually get filled by the suicide, as readers go back to the books to try and understand. <BR/><BR/>With regards to the more general topic and your comments about Bernhard being kept alive by writing, Mailer said something very similar about Hemingway - and, perhaps like Foster Wallace, we don't know yet - it was when the writing was no longer possible that the depression he'd always fought against won out.Adrianhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05651417997212482246noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8470094.post-73568299671439087962008-10-11T09:29:00.000+01:002008-10-11T09:29:00.000+01:00Edmond, I'm not sure that they're fallacies. Perha...Edmond, I'm not sure that they're fallacies. Perhaps items of evidence instead. I hoped I made it clear that I wasn't stating something rather than speculating; wondering aloud.<BR/><BR/>What I was searching for was a way to highlight the space between the cold light of the book and the intangibility of experience (inc. the experience of the book). Bernhard wrote in that space. It doesn't mean that he wrote *about* himself. Re-created himself perhaps. That's why I find his work hopeful.<BR/><BR/>So, Nigel, with that in mind, I'm not sure that merely fictionalising personal experience amounts to what I was suggesting. Bernhard's narrators, for example, are themselves at one remove from another's experience. Even when, such as in Concrete, they are suffering themselves. It's a matter of making that space a felt presence in the work.Stephen Mitchelmorehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01658772259307446873noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8470094.post-75397102223530412962008-10-11T04:53:00.000+01:002008-10-11T04:53:00.000+01:00"It may be instead the margins of the novels and s..."It may be instead the margins of the novels and stories he left will grow wider and we will see it there."<BR/><BR/>Don't really have to wait for the margins to widen...or the text block for that matter:<BR/><BR/>I picked up Oblivion the other day on sale at Canada's monopoly big box book store...On the second page of Good Old Neon the narrator talks about trying analysis, and it not working '...although it did make everyone sound more aware of their own problems and added some useful vocabulary and concepts to the way we all had to talk to each other to fit in and sound a certain way'... and later on down the page "Putting in all this time and energy to create a certain impression and get approval or acceptance that then I felt nothing about because it didn't have anything to do with who I really was inside, and I was disgusted with myself for always being such a fraud, but I couldn't seem to help it.' <BR/><BR/>He then lists about half a page's worth of treatments he tried, followed by "I know this part is boring and probably boring you, by the way, but it gets a lot more interesting when I get to the part where I kill myself and discover what happens immediately after a person dies."NigelBealehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06094387597632333192noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8470094.post-81913077791068389932008-10-11T03:07:00.000+01:002008-10-11T03:07:00.000+01:00Steve, I'm struck by the way this post and your pr...Steve, I'm struck by the way this post and your previous post complement each other. <BR/><BR/>Of DFW, you write that<BR/><BR/>"his work displays, in its size, scope, ambition and worldly success, an energy and optimism unique to his nation's literary life, and unique to its demands. [...] Infinite Jest embodies a certain hope; a hope that everything could be contained in a book, unified by narrative; that with enough talent and hard work, a novel might become the world, a hegemonic power against the regions of the ungraspable."<BR/><BR/>And in the prior post, you gave us the "revelation" that led to Beckett's post-'45 aesthetic:<BR/><BR/>"I simply understood that there was no sense adding to the store of information, gathering knowledge. The whole attempt at knowledge, it seemed to me, had come to nothing. It was all haywire. What I had to do was investigate not-knowing, not-perceiving, the whole world of incompleteness."<BR/><BR/>Those are two radically counterposed ways of approaching writing (altho' the first might find itself always dogged by the second), and I think you're right too in seeing the former as in some ways specifically American ("hegemonic power" was subtly evocative in this regard!). Might there be a cultural impediment making it difficult for American, or even Anglo-American, writers to "produce works that maintain themselves in the actuality of suffering"?<BR/><BR/>On a different tack, I have to say I've always disliked the "medical fallacy", much more even the biographical fallacy, although surely they're related. You know, the idea that El Greco painted such stretched-out figures because of an eye disorder, or that Poe's fiction can be explained by dipsomania, or whatever. Maybe the medical fallacy's extreme reductions are the revenge of Enlightenment rationalism on Romanticism!Edmond Caldwellhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02651618912907453630noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8470094.post-56644986265813719292008-10-10T19:45:00.000+01:002008-10-10T19:45:00.000+01:00It's a point worth clarifying Lloyd. Gitta Honegge...It's a point worth clarifying Lloyd. <BR/><BR/>Gitta Honegger's biography reports that two days before his death Bernhard signed his will and, the day before, called close friends to say goodbye. He then washed down "his final medication" with a bottle of his favourite cider. <BR/><BR/>Also, the TB site is not mine. I have contributed to it of course but I have no control over its content.Stephen Mitchelmorehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01658772259307446873noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8470094.post-51998696067750999192008-10-10T19:35:00.000+01:002008-10-10T19:35:00.000+01:00I don't understand this statement that Thomas Bern...I don't understand this statement that Thomas Bernhard "also killed himself". In the Introductory essay on your own pages about him, Thomas Cousineau says: "Bernhard died of a heart attack on the morning of February 12, one day after the fortieth anniversary of the death of his grandfather."Lloyd Minternhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13152240716731277055noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8470094.post-76763526385360329022008-10-10T16:35:00.000+01:002008-10-10T16:35:00.000+01:00Suicide, whilst always being a product of extreme ...Suicide, whilst always being a product of extreme sickness has always been a public, symbolic gesture hasn't it? Depending on the method, there is always an implied audience. McCartney's only point is that the audience has grown.Matthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11363899647945049847noreply@blogger.com