Man, I miss David Foster Wallace.
I haven’t ever (that I can think of) read anything that better describes my outlook on “society at large” than David Foster Wallace’s brilliant essay “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction” [PDF link]. It’s long but totally worth it.
If you’re lazy, one of the best parts is reproduced below:
So then how have irony, irreverence, and rebellion come to be not liberating but enfeebling in the culture today’s avant-garde tries to write about? One clue’s to be found in the fact that irony is still around, bigger than ever after thirty long years as the dominant mode of hip expression. It’s not a mode that wears especially well. As [Lewis] Hyde puts it, “Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time, it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy their cage.” This is because irony, entertaining as it is, serves an exclusively negative function. It’s critical and destructive, a ground-clearing. Surely this is the way our postmodern fathers saw it. But irony’s singularly unuseful when it comes to constructing anything to replace the hypocrisies it debunks. This is why Hyde seems right about persistent irony being tiresome. It is unmeaty. Even gifted ironists work best in sound bites. I find them sort of wickedly fun to listen to at parties, but I always walk away feeling like I’ve had several radical surgical procedures. And as for actually driving cross-country with a gifted ironist, or sitting through a 300-page novel full of nothing but trendy sardonic exhaustion, one ends up feeling not only empty but somehow… oppressed.
David Foster Wallace killed himself last September. I really, really, really wish he was around to say more. Looking forward to reading/trying to become the bro who can write this, except about the internet and this cultural moment.
